The Southword Editor’s Poetry Award runs once annually. It is a competition organised by the Munster Literature Centre, who also host the Cork International Poetry festival every May and host many other competitions throughout the year.

The organizer is based in county Cork, in the south of Ireland, but accept entries globally. The closing date to this competition is September 30th, 2024, at midnight. Due to the large volume of entries, the organizer be able to notify the authors of non-winning entries or give individual feedback.

There is no maximum word or line count for poems. The entry fee is twenty-four euro or the equivalent in your currency. The top prize is €1000 for the best entry of three poems, publication in Southword, and a complementary year long subscription to Southword. If you are already subscribed, our subscription will be extended for another year. All poems are judged anonymously. There is no theme or limitation regarding style, although hate speech of any kind will not be considered.

Southword is the Irish journal with the most international outlook, regularly publishing writers from Africa, Asia, Australasia, Europe and North America. Southword’s subscription base is split evenly between Ireland and the rest of the world. Poems from Southword have been published in the Forward and Best American Poetry anthologies. Among the poets published by Southword have been Kim Addonizio, Maram al-Masri, Vona Groarke, David Harsent, August Kleinzahler, Suji Kwock Kim, Thomas McCarthy, Valzhyna Mort, Matthew Sweeney and hundreds of others.

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.