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Enter an International Short Story & Poetry Competition

1st Prize £2000
2nd Prize £300
3rd Prize £200

Share your words with us and the world

  • Chance of winning up to £2000 in the short story and poetry main prizes.
  • Separate short story and poetry prize winning categories for those age 17-25 and for local Bedford residents. See all competition categories and prize money here.
  • Open to writers worldwide.

Why enter The Bedford Competition?

How it works

  • Submit your story or poem.
  • Our judges review entries anomously.
  • Winners are announced on our website and celebrated at the presentation event.

Who can enter?

  • New and emerging writers and poets.
  • Experienced writers and poets.
  • Anyone age 17+ worldwide.

Ready to enter?

 

The competition runs annually  between May 1st and October 31st

Meet the 2025 judges

Fran Lock
Poetry Prize Judge
Toby Litt
Short Story Judge
Stephen Bywater
Cygnature Story Judge
Rishi Dastidar
Cygnature Poetry Prize Judge
Kate Packman
Bedford Story Judge
Hazera Forth
Bedford Poetry Judge

Acknowledgements

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University of Bedfordshire
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Fran Lock

Poetry Prize Judge

Fran Lock is the author of numerous chapbooks and fourteen poetry collections. Her most recent collections are Hyena! (Poetry Bus Press, 2023), shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2023 and for the PEN Heaney Prize 2024, and ‘a disgusting lie’: further adventures through the neoliberal hell-mouth (Pamenar Press, 2023). Spectres // Defectors /// No Respecters, an omnibus of three previous titles, with selected new material was published by Culture Matters in late 2024.Her most recent pamphlet is The New Herbal (Blueprint Press, 2024), and Vulgar Errors/ Feral Subjects, a collection of essays exploring feral subjectivity through the lens of the medieval bestiary, was published by Out-Spoken Press last year. Fran was the Judith E. Wilson Poetry Fellow at Cambridge University 2022-2023 and is a Commissioning Editor at the radical arts and culture cooperative Culture Matters. She lives in Kent with her sassy American bully, Luna. 

Toby Litt

Short Story Prize Judge

Toby Litt is a writer, academic and environmental activist based in London. He grew up in Ampthill and went to Bedford Modern School. He has published novels, short story collections and poems. His most recent book is A Writer’s Diary (Galley Beggar, 2023) – and his diary continues to run on Substack.  His novel Patience was shortlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize. He is a member of English Pen and editor of the Writers Rebel website. The recent Netflix series, Dead Boy Detectives, was based on Toby’s run on the Vertigo/DC comic of the same name. Toby is the Head of Creative Writing at the University of Southampton. 

Stephen Bywater

Cygnature Story Prize Judge

Stephen Bywater joined the merchant navy at sixteen before going on to study English at university. After graduating he taught in South and Central America for three years, returning to the UK to complete an MLitt at St Andrews. For the past twenty years he has taught English in Bedford, where he lives with his wife and two daughters. He is currently teaching English at a college in Cambridge He is the author of two novels, The Devil’s Ark and Night of the Damned (published by Headline/Hachette), and is currently working on his third.

Rishi Dastidar

Cygnature Poery Prize Judge

Rishi Dastidar’s poetry has been published by the Financial Times and BBC amongst many others. He is a fellow of The Complete Works, and a consulting editor at The Rialto magazine. A poem from his debut collection Ticker-tape was included in The Forward Book of Poetry 2018, and his second collection, Saffron Jack, was published in the UK by Nine Arches Press in 2020. He is also editor of The Craft: A Guide to Making Poetry Happen in the 21st Century (Nine Arches Press), and co-editor of Too Young, Too Loud, Too Different: Poems from Malika’s Poetry Kitchen (Corsair).

A poem from Rishi Dastidar’s Laurel Prize long-listed third collection, Neptune’s Projects (Nine Arches Press), was included in The Forward Book of Poetry 2024. He is editor of The Craft: A Guide to Making Poetry Happen in the 21st Century (Nine Arches Press), and co-editor of Too Young, Too Loud, Too Different: Poems from Malika’s Poetry Kitchen (Corsair). He also reviews poetry for The Guardian (UK) and is a trustee of Wasafiri. (Photograph credit: Naomi Woddis)

Kate Packman

Bedford Story Prize Judge

Kate Packman is the author of You Can See the End of the World From Here which was longlisted for the Bridport Novel Prize 2024 (published by author cooperative Protea Press). The novel explores the challenges of parenting, mental health issues and the menopause. After graduating from University of Bedfordshire, she completed an MA in creative writing at Birkbeck. She has spent the last decade teaching secondary school English language and literature in Bedfordshire as well as chairing Ampthill Literary Festival for over five years. She is an active member of Ampthill Writers’ Group.

 

Hazera Forth

Bedford Poetry Prize Judge

Hazera Forth co-organises Bedford’s Stanza poetry society and participates in a number of other poetry groups in Bedford. Her work has been long listed in the Poetry Wales Pamphlet Prize and several other publications. After nearly half a century of post 1971 immigration generational trauma, Hazera pursues enlightenment through allotmenteering, twitching, performance poeting and nature writing.  Hazera was a Trustee at Bedford Players Trust for 18 months. Currently a leader in analytics in the NHS, she hopes that one day fate will have her standing up at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.