The Department of English at Queen Mary University of London is delighted to invite submissions to its writing competition, now in its second year. Designed to foster and reward the best new writing by students in Years 11, 12 and 13 from across the UK, we will be awarding one prize for an original piece of Creative Writing and one prize for an original Essay.
A shortlist of entries will be drawn up by an expert panel from the Department of English. Winners will be selected by the acclaimed poet Victoria Adukwei Bulley. Short-listed for the prestigious T.S. Eliot Prize, Victoria’s debut collection, Quiet (Faber 2022), was awarded the Rathbones Folio Prize and the John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize in 2023. You can find out more about Victoria and read some of her writing here.
The deadline for submissions is 6pm on Friday 17th April. All entrants will receive tailored feedback from an expert reader.
The winners will be announced in late Spring 2026. They will each be awarded £250 in book vouchers. Those who are short-listed will also receive a certificate of commendation.
We will be holding a writing workshop at our Mile End campus on Wednesday 26th November 2025, 2-4pm. At this workshop, you will have the opportunity to work on your submission, and experience some of what studying English Literature and Creative Writing at University entails.
Places are limited. Book here.
If you have any queries please email us at:
2025/26 Theme: ‘Flight’
‘Stay near me—do not take thy flight! / A little longer stay in sight!’, begins William Wordsworth’s ‘To a Butterfly’, a short poem marked as much by grief as wonder. Like Wordworth’s butterfly, our theme for this year’s prize is designed to evoke a range of feelings and beings, from the majesty of murmuring starlings to the trials of modern migration and much more between.
If you’re submitting creative writing, we encourage you to explore flight’s various meanings. Who or what takes flight? Where do they travel? And why? What role does flight play in our imagination? What kind of dreaming does it encourage? What sense of escape does it enable? Does an airplane journey constitute flight? What about the metaphorical value of flying high or flying solo?
Creative writing entries may include up to three short poems (no more than 30 lines each) or one long poem (around 100 lines), a piece of extended prose (no more than 1000 words), or a playscript (around 100 lines). We are open to other suggestions, but please write to confirm before submitting.
Those submitting an essay should consider the way flight patterns literary writing, whether as a plot device or in other more imaginative terms. Think, for instance, about Satan’s flight in Paradise Lost or Ariel in The Tempest. Why have birds and their movement been central to famous poems by Angelou, Dickinson, Frost, Hopkins, and Keats? Or perhaps you want to consider modern humans taking flight, to think with a character in Henderson the Rain King who ‘dreamed at the clouds from both sides as no other generation of men has done’? Or formerly enslaved people, such as William Wells Brown and Frederick Douglass, who documented their flights to freedom? In responding to this theme, we encourage you to be as inventive as you wish. You are welcome to think about the idea of flight in literature across time and in different contexts.
Essays should be no more than 1000 words. They must include close analysis of one or more primary text written in English (a novel, poem, or play). We encourage you to think creatively about how your chosen text engages this year’s theme. How does it ask us to think differently about the idea of flight? What possibilities does flight enable for your text, especially when it comes to questions of literary form?