The 2025 BHAC Sussex Poetry Competition is open for entries!
Entries are welcomed from all those aged over 16, who have a connection with Sussex. Entry fees are £6 for the first poem, and £5 for each extra poem – you may enter as many poems as you wish! Additionally we have a Student Competition for which all entries are free. Please see our Terms and Conditions for more details.
👉ENTER THE COMPETITION ONLINE NOW!
If you prefer to ENTER BY POST please download and print our postal entry form.
Entries will close Sunday, October 5th at midnight.
The winners of the Poetry Competition will be announced at the awards ceremony.
The Sussex Poetry Competition is in partnership with The University of Brighton.
Poetry Competition prize details
FIRST PRIZE £1000
SECOND PRIZE £300
THIRD PRIZE Work, Write, Live creative writing tutorial
HIGHLY COMMENDED (X4) £30
FIRST PRIZE IN THE STUDENT COMPETITION £150
HIGHLY COMMENDED IN THE STUDENT COMPETITION (X2) £30
Poems on the Buses
We are delighted to announce the return of Poems on the Buses to the Poetry Competition! Brighton & Hove Buses will be celebrating Sussex creativity by displaying selected entries to the Sussex Poetry Competition on their bus fleet.
Adjudication
This year’s competition judge is Jeremy Page of The Frogmore Press.
Jeremy Page is an Emeritus Senior Lecturer (School of Media, Arts and Humanities) at the University of Sussex. His poetry and short stories are widely published. His latest full collection of poems is The Naming (Frogmore Press, 2021). His translations of Catullus’s Lesbia poems were published by Ashley Press as The Cost of All Desire in 2011. His own poems have been translated into German, Italian and Romanian, and a bilingual Romanian/English edition of his work was published by Integral, Bucharest as If Not Now / Daca nu Acum in 2017. Two plays have been performed: Loving Psyche in Bremen (2010) and Verrall of the White Hart in Lewes (2014). In 2015 he co-edited with Rachel Cole an anthology of life writing, True Tales from the Old Hill, published by The Frogmore Press in collaboration with the Centre for Life History and Life Writing Research at Sussex. His novella London Calling was published by Cultured Llama in 2018. (ref. from University of Sussex)
The Frogmore Press was founded by André Evans and Jeremy Page at the Frogmore Tea Rooms in Folkestone in 1983. The Press has published hundreds of writers in its now bi-annual magazine The Frogmore Papers and also in individual collections and anthologies. Early work by numerous writers who have gone on to consolidate their reputations elsewhere appeared in the magazine. (ref. from The Frogmore Press)