United Kingdom

Contests tagged United Kingdom are the ones run from Britain, and they tend to be judged on a single poem, a short story or a first novel rather than on a whole list. The names here are the ones a British entrant meets first: the Bridport Prize, the CWA Debut Dagger, the Oxford Flash Fiction Prize.

If you write in English but live outside the United States, this is the tag where the deadlines and the reading habits line up with the British small press and the crime establishment.

What separates the United Kingdom contests from their United States, Australian and Canadian counterparts is the spread of forms they cover. The Bridport Prize and the Clevedon Poetry Award keep poetry at the centre, while the Oxford Flash Fiction Prize and Chalk Circle 1500 work at the short end of prose, and the Goldfinch Novel Award and CWA Debut Dagger serve novelists, the second of those specifically for a first crime novel. The Hastings Poetry Competition belongs to the same poetry strand. A writer can enter a single poem in one and a full manuscript in another without leaving the same national circuit, and the Bridport Prize is the one that carries both a poetry and a short story section. For those seeking contests across the UK, this is the cluster where entry routes are counted in poems, flashes and chapters rather than in one house style.