Literary Contests, Grants & Fellowships
Use our site search feature—This search engine searches the full Resource database, and will return hits from each section of the Resources that meet your search criteria. A dedicated search for the Contests database is available on the index page.
Hints: 1) Use "quotes" around phrases. 2) To find physical resources that may be located near you, use your city's or state's name—and we have listed resources in several English speaking countries and those where English is widely spoken. 3) you can also use some component of a group identity in your search, i.e.: Latino, African (African-American), Gay, Women etc.
About Literary Contests
Literary contests offer poets and writers an opportunity to earn prestige, become published and win prize money in excess of what they might otherwise receive for publication. Literary publishers often rely on revenue from these contests simply to defray the cost of the opportunity they offer to writers. They seldom profit from contest fees to any significant extent.If you would like to learn more about literary contests before diving into our indices, including the secrets to winning, click here.
Youth Poetry Contests & Poetry Scholarship Competitions (a work in progress)—are in a separate section, and lists many free poetry contests and writing contests for youth.
Click here to open the contest indexes in a new window. *The differences between literary contests can be striking. We will make no attempt to list every literary contest, but will attempt to list those that offer the most significant prestige and awards, and those that we understand to be legitimate.
Please let us know if you find a competition among our listings that you find questionable:
