Winter Tangerine Awards call for prose, poetry entries
An international writing contest, Winter Tangerine Awards (WT), is offering N88,000 each for winners of its 2019 prize. Participants are expected to send four poems or two pieces of prose before July 1 2019. Those eligible are emerging writers who have not yet published a collection of short stories, poems or a novel. Results will […]
An international writing contest, Winter Tangerine Awards (WT), is offering N88,000 each for winners of its 2019 prize.
Participants are expected to send four poems or two pieces of prose before July 1 2019. Those eligible are emerging writers who have not yet published a collection of short stories, poems or a novel.
Results will be announced in January 2020. Top winners in each genre will receive a cash prize of N88,000 and copies of Honeysuckle Press’ 2019 catalogue. Finalists will get N17,000 each.
This year the WT Awards will be judged by Tiana Clark in poetry and Kiese Laymon in prose. Previous have been judged by Ocean Vuong, Jaquira Diaz, Aracelis Girmay, Chris Abani, Randa Jarrar, and Kaveh Akbar.
Clark said: “I’m drawn to risk and surprise in poems. I admire poets toggling grief and gratitude, poets that breathe new life and vision inside the nostrils of dead language. I’m looking for a duende-drenched poem that will rearrange my cells, flood my blood and afternoon. I want to be haunted by striking and specific imagery, but I also love the dream world, the gauzy, and abstract landscapes that drip intensely with mood. I want to gasp at your line breaks and attention to aesthetics. I love quiet poems and mic-dropping poems, but both poems must have resonance. I love poems that are invested in a type of emotional truth that articulates a type of freedom that I often don’t feel in my own daily life. I’m invested in a type of transformation and protest on the page. I love little poems and long poems, but again both poems must have resonance. I want to swerve and feel throttled by some type of volta/pivot/arc. I love all forms, broken forms, hybrid forms, and the psychology of forms. Most poems I cherish bring me back to the page, a new draft bubbling from the wild yeast of prosody and proximity. With all that said, I just want to be able to throw your poem across the room because it’s so damn good. I want to be mad and glad and sad at you for a few minutes, because your poem is so damn good.”
Since 2015, the Winter Tangerine Awards has honoured emerging writers that “envision new possibilities on the page and forge avenues of empathy through their literary work.”