The Curae Prize 2025

The Curae Prize is a literary award just for writer-carers.

Writer, teacher and mentor Dr Anna Vaught, who has been a carer at different periods in her life and who was a young carer, started the Curae prize in 2022 to shine a light on the role and to offer a platform to carers who were also writers or who wanted to write. The idea was that it offered creative focus and community, plus access to the publishing industry.

In its first year, Curae attracted a wealth of extraordinary submissions and the inaugural prize was widely praised for its inclusivity and spotlighting of neglected talent. People from across industry offer prizes – from a bursary to an online course to agent mentoring to book tokens – and all shortlisted and winning entries are published in a beautiful book, with an introduction by Anna and all edited by Will Dady, Director of the award-winning Renard Press, who publish the book beautifully.

All proceeds go to carers’ charities.

It is free to enter, you can send poetry, short fiction or short non-fiction (including creative non-fiction).

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.