The Competition has been going since 1991 and is open to all ages, offering prizes totalling £1000 across three categories of adult poetry, adult other writing (stories, essays, lyrics etc) and a children’s section.

Entry to the competition is £2 per item but under-14s can enter for free. The deadline for entries is Monday 28 November.

This years winners will be announced at a special awards event at the Royal Clifton Hotel on Wednesday 7 December (6.30pm –8.30pm). The event is to be hosted by David Lonsdale (Heartbeat, The Royal) with entertainment from poet Kei Miller.

Emma Lloyd, Marketing & Programme Manager says:

The Sefton Writing Competition is an annual event that receives hundreds of entries. Past winners have gone on to write their own material and becomes published authors and poets.

We want to support writing initiatives and will publish the winning entries in the new SEFTON magazine and online.

Tickets are available to those who have entered the competition and can be booked over the phone on 0151 928 1919 and picked up from The Civic, Crosby.

Entry forms can be downloaded from the Sefton Arts website but can also be picked up from Southport Tourist Information Centre, libraries, leisure centres and council outlets across Sefton.

Tickets for all Sefton Celebrates Writing Festival events and workshops are on sale now, just call 0151 928 1919 or go online and book your tickets at www.seftonarts.co.uk.

Barry Chambers’ garden won a Gold Medal and was inspired by ‘On the Sea’ by John Keats. This sonnet was written in 1817 and celebrates the excitement and danger the sea provides. Here is a picture of the winning garden followed by the poem it drew inspiration from:

It keeps eternal whisperings around
Desolate shores, and with its mighty swell
Gluts twice ten thousand Caverns, till the spell
Of Hecate leaves them their old shadowy sound.
Often ’tis in such gentle temper found,
That scarcely will the very smallest shell
Be moved for days from where it sometime fell.
When last the winds of Heaven were unbound.
Oh, ye! who have your eyeballs vexed and tired,
Feast them upon the wideness of the Sea;
Oh ye! whose ears are dinned with uproar rude,
Or fed too much with cloying melody—
Sit ye near some old Cavern’s Mouth and brood,
Until ye start, as if the sea nymphs quired!

The RHS website says the following about the garden and the poem:

This design rejoices in chaos. Like a stormy sea, many of the plants are exuberant and out of control.

A Silver Medal was awarded to Yvonne Mathews for her take on Byron’s ‘Love’s Last Adieu’. The garden was built by former grave-digger Rob Carr and gardeners from Co-Operative Funeralcare and is labelled as a “garden of mourning.”

Here is a verse from ‘Love’s Last Adieu’ and a picture of its corresponding garden:

In vain, with endearments, we soothe the sad heart,
In vain do we vow for an age to be true;
The chance of an hour may command us to part,
Or Death disunite us, in Love’s last adieu!

A Silver-Gilt Medal was awarded to The Design CIC for their garden based on Lewis Carroll’s ‘Jabberwocky’.

This garden is designed to form the final part of an extended therapeutic play space for Kids Company in South London – their avowed mission is to help heal traumatised young lives.

“And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!”
He chortled in his joy.

Other gardens were based on Kipling’s ‘My Boy Jack’; ‘Mont Blanc’ by Percy Bysshe Shelley and ‘Rural Architecture’ by William Wordsworth and can all be viewed by clicking here.

Are you a bit of a bookworm? Want to test your literary expertise? Well, here’s your chance!

Linghams Booksellers are holding a literary quiz night on Wednesday 22^nd June, from 19.30 – 21.30. Entry costs £5 and includes a glass of wine, nibbles and 10% off any full price item in store. The quiz is open to teams or individual competitors – why not bring your book club along and prove you know your Dickens from your Dostoyevsky?

Tickets are available to buy from Linghams Booksellers, 248 Telegraph Road, Heswall or call 0151 342 7290.

The Lightship International Literary Prizes was set-up by Irish writer, publisher and lecturer at the University of Hull, Simon Kerr.  The competition aims to find and support exciting new novelists, poets and short story writers.

Lightship’s honorary patrons are Costa Book Award Winner Christopher Reid, Sir Andrew Motion, Lindsay Clarke and Man Booker Prize Winner Hilary Mantel; judging the short story, poetry and flash fiction categories this year will be Toby Litt, Jackie Kay and Kachi A. Ozumba.

Click here for more information.

You can enter online here.

Winning poets will be invited to appear at the Wigtown Book Festival in 2011, and will be published in Southlight, the Dumfries and Galloway Literary magazine.

1st Prize is £2500.

The closing date is Tuesday 3rd May 2011 at 5pm. Please click here for more information.

The competition is open to all primary, secondary and sixth form students on the Wirral, with cash prizes for all winners and runners up in each age category, and the “Chris Salmon Cup” for the overall winner. The overall winner will also be appointed the Wirral Young Poet Laureate 2011, and, as such, will be commissioned to write and read poems for public and civic events. The event is funded by The Chris Salmon Foundation.

The announcement of the winners and presentation of the prizes will take place at the Bromborough Civic Centre in April 2011, to coincide with what would have been Chris’s 18^th birthday. The well known local poet Levi Tafari will be the special guest on the night. 

This year’s theme is “Peace”, and the entry form can be found  here.

All money raised will go towards supporting vendors as they improve the quality of their lives.

The winning poem will be published in The Big Issue in the North magazine alongside an interview with the writer. The poems will also be published online and on Twitter and Facebook.

Closing date 18th October 2010

• The theme this year is “Home” in line with National Poetry Day.
• Poems should be no more than 40 lines.
• Judged by Peter Kalu, Rosie Lugosi and Jackie Kay.
• A minimum donation of £3 per poem is requested.

Make your donation at www.justgiving.com/bigscribble then send poems to jane.logan@thebiglifecompany.com
Or enter by post, send a cheque made payable to “The Big Issue in the North Trust” and your poem to The Big Scribble,10 Swan Street, Manchester, M4 5JN.

Winners will be invited to an event where they can read their poems aloud (or hear them being read out if they prefer).

Prizes for 1st, 2nd and 3rd place will be announced shortly.

Now The National Trust is searching for the best poem encapsulating the British countryside. Not an easy task, I hear you cry, when there are reams of pages on the very subject that could fill the whole of the nation’s green and pleasant land most likely more than once over. That is why a shortlist of ten poems has been selected, all of which appear in an new anthology, Ode to the Countryside. The collection features more than 100 poetic celebrations of landscapes protected by The National Trust.

‘Poets have always written about the places they belong to, and which belong to them. Nowadays it might be the Manchester cityscape or a community landmark, but these classic poems collected by the National Trust are reflective, rural and relaxing’.

Poet and Director of National Poetry Day Jo Bell had the perhaps unenviable task of narrowing down the list to a mere ten. She has commented on her choices – which some may find surprising – by saying she did not want to “play the same old records”, with the featured poems presenting the darkness of the countryside alongside the idealistic visions we are used to from popular 19th century ‘nature poetry’ in particular.

The shortlisted poems are:

• The Quiet Life – Alexander Pope
• Milking Time – Robert Bloomfield
• On a Lane in Spring – John Clare
• Sweet Suffolke Owl – Anon
• Spring Song – John Davidson
• I Watched a Blackbird – Thomas Hardy
• The Lambs of Grasmere – Christina Rossetti
• The Herefordshire Landscape – Elizabeth Barrett Browning
• Binsey Poplars – Gerard Manley Hopkins
• By Severn – Ivor Gurney

All of the poems feature on The National Trust’s website where you are able to vote for your favourite from the selection. The ultimate ‘favourite’ poem about the British countryside will be announced later in the year.

If you’re unhappy with the shortlist, or your personal favourite has been missed out, alternatives can be suggested on The National Trust’s Facebook and Twitter pages. Or why not let us know about your favourite countryside-inspired odes right here?

While you’re mulling it over, you may also be inspired by The National Trust’s recommendations of outdoor spaces to get lost in a good book - quite handy if an indian summer is in store (otherwise your pages may get a bit soggy).

Download the entry form here.