The Allingham Festival 2017 Flash Fiction and Poetry Competitions are now open! We have received some fantastic entries over the years (you can read some of the more recent winning entries on our website), and we expect the same again this year.
Our competitions are designed to recognise and reward talented writers who, following in the footsteps of William Allingham, seek to launch or further their careers. The Allingham Festival includes competitions for adult writers of poetry and flash fiction, and also for children. The festival also offers readings and workshops led by nationally-recognised literary figures where aspiring authors can meet, share ideas, and discuss the emerging trends in the world of writing and publishing.
This year are judges are Paul Lynch, Moya Cannon and Monica Corish.
The deadline is Friday the 9th of September 2017 for postal entries and midnight on Sunday the 11th of September 2017 for online entries.
The top prize in both Flash Fiction and Poetry is €300. Winners are invited to read their winning entries at a special awards ceremony at the Literary Lunch on Saturday November 11th.
For more information on the competition and how to enter, click on the button below:
THE COMPETITION JUDGES
This year's judges are Moya Cannon, Paul Lynch and Monica Corish.
Paul Lynch is this year's Allingham Flash Fiction Competition judge. Paul is the prize-winning author of GRACE, THE BLACK SNOW and RED SKY IN MORNING. He won the French booksellers’ prize Prix Libr’à Nous for Best Foreign Novel and was a finalist for the Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger (Best Foreign Book Prize). He won the Prix des Lecteurs Privat, and was nominated for France’s Prix Femina, the Prix du Premier Roman (First Novel Prize) and the Prix du Roman Fnac (Fnac Novel Prize), as well as being shortlisted at Ireland’s Bord Gais Irish Books of the Year. In the US, both his novels were Amazon.com books of the month and he was selected by Barnes and Noble for the Discover Great New Writers series. Paul was born in Limerick in 1977, grew up in Co. Donegal, and lives in Dublin with his wife and daughter. He was the chief film critic of Ireland’s Sunday Tribune newspaper from 2007 to 2011, when the newspaper folded. He has written for many Irish newspapers and has written regularly for The Sunday Times on film.
Moya Cannon will judge this year's Allingham Poetry Competition. Moya is the author of five collections of poems, the most recent being Keats Lives (2015, Carcanet Press, Manchester). She was born in Dunfanaghy, County Donegal, spent most of her adult life in Galway and now lives in Dublin. She studied History and Politics at University College, Dublin, and International Relations at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. Her work sings of deep connections— the impulse to ritual and pattern that, across centuries, defines us a human, a web of interdependences that sustain the ‘gratuitous beauty’ of the planet. A winner of the Brendan Behan and Lawrence O Shaughnessy awards, she has edited Poetry Ireland Review and was 2011 Heimbold Professor of Irish Studies at Villanova University. Her Collected Poems will be published by Carcanet Press in 2018.
Monica Corish, filter judge for the Allingham Poetry and Flash Fiction Competitions, is a Kinlough-based poet. She won the 2013 North-West Words Poetry Prize and has been awarded literature bursaries by the Arts Council, Leitrim Arts Office and ADAI. Her short story Sepia is included in the Hennessy Book of Irish Fiction 2005-2015. Her first collection of poetry, Slow Mysteries, was published by Doghouse Books; her second collection, Gleanings, by the Leitrim Arts Office in June 2015. Her third collection, A Dying Language (2016), was published by the Irish Hospice Association.