Write By The Sea Writing Competition

The 10th annual Write By The Sea Writing Competition is open until Friday 6th June 2025, 18:00 Irish Standard Time.

The winner of each category will receive a cash prize of €500 and a free weekend pass to the Write By The Sea Festival 2025. All four winning pieces will be published in Issue 10 of The Waxed Lemon Literary Journal.

The runners-up in each category will receive €300 and third place will receive €200.

There are four competition categories:

• Fiction Short Story (maximum 2,500 words)
• Flash Fiction (maximum 700 words)
• Poetry (maximum 40 lines)
• Memoir/Personal Essay (maximum 1,000 words)

The independent panel of judges will select the winners and each category winner will be invited to read from their work at a public event as part of the festival.

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.