The Oxford Poetry Prize is awarded annually for a single poem in the English language.

The winner receives a cash prize of £1,000, the runner-up receives £200, and the second runner-up receives £100. All prize-winners will be offered publication in Oxford Poetry. The competition closes at midnight UTC on Sunday, 31 August 2025. This year's guest judge is Rebecca Tamás.

How to submit:
 

• Entries should consist of one poem per uploaded file. The only acceptable file format is PDF.
• Entrants have the option of submitting more than one poem as part of their submission (in separate files, as detailed above). Each poem costs £10 to submit.
• There is no limit to the number of poems each individual may submit.
• The competition is open to poets age 18 or over (on the date of their submission) living anywhere in the world.
• Entries are accepted through this Submittable form only.
• Each poem submitted must be a maximum of 50 lines (not including titles or blank lines).
• Poems submitted must be the entrant’s own original work, and must not have been generated, in whole or in part, by an artificial intelligence, chatbot, or other natural language processing software.
• Submitted poems must not have been previously published elsewhere, in print or online (including social media, websites, and blogs).
• Since submissions are read blind, please do not include your name or any identifying information in or on the documents you upload. Submissions that include this identifying information on the poem pages (within the PDF) will automatically be disqualified. However, please DO include your full name in either the Title or Cover Letter fields in the Submittable online form.
• Note that if you click the Withdraw button on Submittable, you are withdrawing your entire submission from consideration, not just a single poem. If you need to withdraw only a single poem in your submission, please send us a message through Submittable saying which poem you would like to withdraw. If you send us an email rather than a message through Submittable, it will not be linked to your submission and may be overlooked.
• Submission of a poem to the 2025 Oxford Poetry Prize constitutes the entrant’s acceptance of the competition’s full Terms and Conditions, which can be read here.
• If you are having trouble proceeding to the payment page, try hitting the ‘Save Draft’ button at the bottom of the page. That should activate the ‘Continue to Payment’ button.
• A limited number of free entries is available to low-income writers on a first-come first-serve basis. Please contact us by email to enquire about free entry.
• If you are submitting from outside the UK, please keep in mind that the competition deadline on 31 August is midnight in the time standard UTC (same as the time zone GMT).