Age Categories:
5-18 year olds (Categories: 5-7, 8-11, 11-13 & 14-18).
Deadline:
Friday 5 February 2021.
Who is it for?
Any keen writers, national and international, looking to write to a great theme: music. You could play with lyricism (use sensory description - onomatopoeia, alliteration, assonance, sibiliance…), explore the way in which music represents a multiplicity of cultures, how music can trigger memory and evoke a certain time & place…the possibilities are endless!
Overview:
“MUSIC
We are the music makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams…
What music do you like?” The question asked on every first date...
“That’s not music, that’s just noise!” Every parent’s review of their children’s favourite band...
“Music is the art which is most nigh to tears and memory...” Oscar Wilde on how a song can roll back the years and take you to a place forgotten, with friends long gone.
Literature and music have always gone hand in hand. Poets and authors, from Percy Shelley To William Shakespeare, John Keats to Jane Austen and Nick Hornby to Roddy Doyle have woven it as themes through their works. 2021 is the 150th Anniversary of the Royal Albert Hall, a venue which has seen every style of music performed beneath its iconic dome. To celebrate this, the 16th Elmbridge Literary Competition is looking for poems and short stories that take music as their inspiration.
Following the success of 2020’s ‘New World’, The Elmbridge Literary Competition is once more open to national and international submissions. Run in partnership between The R C Sherriff Trust and Elmbridge Borough Council, it is open to all ages.
Entry for adults is £5 with under 18s free.
Alongside the prizes for each age category The 2020 Competition includes The Elmbridge prize for the best story or poem in the adult category submitted by an Elmbridge resident.
The Competition will once again run in partnership with publishers Sampson Low, who will publish the winning entries as a Chapbook. (Small and affordable forms of literature, Chapbooks historically were sold on the streets, and covered a range of subjects from fairy tales and ghost stories to news of politics, crime or disaster.)
For further details about Chapbooks visit: