THOMAS HARDY SOCIETY POETRY COMPETITION
in memory of James Gibson

First prize £3000 ~ Second prize £1000
Third prize £500 ~ ten awards of £50

The Thomas Hardy Society, in association with Agenda magazine, is sponsoring a poetry competition to commemorate the late James Gibson, who edited Hardy's Complete Poems, and was a founder-member as well as a former
Chairman of the Society.

Prizes will be awarded for the best poems, of forty lines or fewer, previously unpublished, and showing some affinity with the work of Thomas Hardy, whether in terms of subject-matter, theme or technique.

There will be a first prize of £3000, a second prize of £1000, a third prize of £500 and ten runners-up awards of £50 - these last being particularly intended to encourage new writers. The three best entries will be published in the Autumn issue of Agenda and in the Hardy Society Journal.*

Closing date for entries: March 1st, 2008
Winners to be informed by 15th June

There will be a reception for prize-winners in Dorchester on Saturday, July 26th to mark the start of the Thomas Hardy Conference and Festival. This will be the occasion for public announcement of the results.

The adjudicator will be the poet, critic and translator Bernard O'Donoghue.

His poetry collections include Poaching Rights (1987), The Weakness (1991), Gunpowder (1995) (winner of the Whitbread Poetry Award), Here nor There (1999) and Outliving (2003). In 2006 he published a translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. He teaches Medieval English at the University of Oxford, where he is a Fellow of Wadham College. He is also the author of The Courtly Love Tradition (1982) and Seamus Heaney and the Language of Poetry (1995).

*SPECIAL OFFER: SUBSCRIBE to Agenda NOW and receive a FREE copy of the
THOMAS HARDY SPECIAL ISSUE of Agenda, 1972.
(collectors' items, worth £100 each.)

click here for

application form & competition rules