Blake Poetry Prize
Exploring the Religious and Spiritual Through Poetry
The 2013 Blake Poetry Prize is now open and accepting entries. Entries close Friday 14 June.
If you’re interested in entering your poem, you can download and fill in the 2013 Blake Entry Form and follow the submission guidelines on the flyer. You can find the answers to the most frequently asked questions here.
Presented by the NSW Writers’ Centre and the Blake Society, the $5,000 Prize is named for visionary artist and poet William Blake, and was established to give Australian poets new possibilities to explore religion and spirituality in the twenty-first century.
The 2013 judges
Robert Adamson is one of Australia’s leading poets. He has written 20 books, mostly collections of poetry but also a few autobiographies. His work has been translated into several languages and is internationally published. He won the Blake Poetry Prize in 2011. Adamson on the prize: “Of all the prizes for poetry the Blake is the one, like its namesake, it stands for something more than its generous bounty. It vibrates with Blake’s unique vision”.Michelle Cahill is the author of two collections of poetry and two chapbooks and the co-editor of Contemporary Asian Australian Poets (Puncher and Wattmann, 2013).
She was highly commended in the Blake Poetry Prize, the Wesley Michel Wright Prize and received the Val Vallis Award. She edits Mascara Literary Review. In 2013 she is the CAL/UOW International Poetry Fellow at Kingston University, London.
Eileen Chong is a Sydney poet. In 2010 she won the Poets Union Youth Fellowship, and she was the Australian Poetry Fellow for 2011-2012. She was awarded an Australian Postgraduate Award to pursue a Doctorate of Creative Arts at UWS in 2011. Her first collection, Burning Rice, was published in the New Voices Series 2012 by Australian Poetry.
To find out more about the competition and enter, download the 2013 Blake Entry Form. To find out more about the previous winners, click here.
About The Blake Society
The Blake Society is an independent organization that administers an annual Exhibition and Prize for contemporary religious and spiritual art. The aim of the Blake Society is to encourage contemporary artists to explore the spiritual in art. The Blake Society was formed at the instigation of a Jesuit priest, Michael Scott and a Jewish businessman, Richard Morley. They hoped that the establishment of a prize would encourage artists of disparate styles and religious allegiances to create significant works of art with religious content. Today its members hope to stimulate the interaction of ideas and spiritual thought across all contemporary artistic media in Australia. The Society is a registered charity with DGR status.For more information on the 2012 competition, click here. The Blake Poetry Prize is made possible by the support of Leichhardt Municipal Council, which has a strong commitment to supporting the arts.
