Founded in 2005, the Wigtown Poetry Prizes are some of the UK’s best established writing competitions, offering awards in all three of Scotland’s languages with a prize pot of over £3000. The 2025 prizes mark 20 years of Wigtown Poetry Prizes and over £50,000 awarded to emerging and established poets.

The competition closes on 7 May 2025, with a prize-giving at Wigtown Book Festival in the autumn.

Poems may be on any subject. Poems must not be previously published, accepted for publication or currently entered into another competition.

Entrants must be 16 years of age or over.

Winning and runner-up poems will be published on the Wigtown Poetry Prizes website after the prize-giving. Winning poems will be published in Southlight Magazine in autumn 2025.

We are keen to encourage quality, so suggest writers to check their stories before submitting using Prowritingaid. They have free and paid versions and are the best writing software we know to help improve grammar, readability and check for repetition, ‘sticky’ sentences and suggest alternatives.