In these days of uncertainly for us all, with unexpected time on our hands, you are invited to enter a Yorkshire-wide young and emerging writers competition as an outlet to channel creative energy and offer focus and inspiration for testing new ideas and honing your writing skills.
Hive Young Writers’ Competition is open to young people, aged 14 to 30, from across the whole of Yorkshire and nearby. Whether stories or poetry (or both) are your thing, you can enter up to three pieces of work at any time before 23rd June 2020.
There’s no set theme, the competition is completely open, the organisers are just looking for your best work. But they also want to offer some resources for those who might be looking for inspiration and guidance to help get you started.
INSPIRATION
If you’re after inspiration to get you writing or coming up with ideas, you’ll find a gallery of great photos and lots of prompts and tips on www.hivesouthyorkshire.com to get you started and sparking ideas in relation to them.
PRIZES
First place prizes: Kindle Fire HDs and writing goodies
Highly commended and commended: writer’s goodies and vouchers
All three winners in each category will be offered professional feedback on their work (optional), and have their work showcased in Hive’s 2020 young writers’ anthology. All winners and commended will be invited to read at an event later in the year. Commended may be invited to submit to the Hive 2020 anthology.
JUDGES
POETRY
Jonathan Edwards’s first collection of poems, My Family and Other Superheroes (Seren, 2014), received the Costa Poetry Award and the Wales Book of the Year People’s Choice Award, and was shortlisted for the Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize. His second collection, Gen (Seren, 2018), also received the Wales Book of the Year People’s Choice Award, and in 2019 his poem about Newport Bridge was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem.
Jonathan won the Terry Hetherington Award in 2010, was awarded a Literature Wales new writer’s bursary in 2011. In 2012 he won prizes in the Cardiff International Poetry Competition and the Basil Bunting Award. His poems have appeared in many magazines including The Poetry Review, The North, and New Welsh Review.
Jonathan has read his poems on BBC radio and television, recorded them for the Poetry Archive, and leads workshops in schools, universities and prisons. He is editor of Poetry Wales magazine and lives in South Wales.
SHORT STORY & FLASH FICTION
Paula Rawsthorne is a multi-award-winning writer of Young Adult fiction. She discovered that she could write when she won a national BBC writing competition and her comic tale, The Sermon on the Mount was read by Bill Nighy on Radio 4. Her dark stories for adults have been published in anthologies of contemporary literature. Her first YA novel, The Truth about Celia Frost, was a winner of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators, Undiscovered Voices. Published by Usborne, it was shortlisted for eleven literary awards and won the Leeds, Sefton and Nottingham Book Awards. Her second novel, Blood Tracks, won the Rib Valley Book Award.
Paula’s short stories for teenagers have been commissioned by Nottingham UNESCO City of Literature and published in an anthology of award-winning Young Adult authors. Paula’s third YA novel, Shell, (Scholastic 2018) won the North East Teen Book Award, The Derbyshire Schools’ Book Award and The Hampshire Book Award. Her latest Black Mirror-esque YA novel, The New Boy, was published last year.
Paula is invited to do author visits in schools throughout the UK and is a writer in residence for the literacy charity, ‘First Story’. She lives in Nottingham with her husband and three children who are all much taller than her. Find out more about Paula and her books: www.paularawsthorne.wordpress.com or on Twitter @paularawsthorne
For guidelines and details on how to enter see www.hivesouthyorkshire.com/enter.