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The Department of English at Queen Mary University of London is delighted to invite submissions to its writing competition, now in its second year. Designed to foster and reward the best new writing by students in Years 11, 12 and 13 from across the UK, we will be awarding one prize for an original piece of Creative Writing and one prize for an original Essay.
A shortlist of entries will be drawn up by an expert panel from the Department of English. Winners will be selected by the acclaimed poet Victoria Adukwei Bulley. Short-listed for the prestigious T.S. Eliot Prize, Victoria’s debut collection, Quiet (Faber 2022), was awarded the Rathbones Folio Prize and the John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize in 2023. You can find out more about Victoria and read some of her writing here.
The deadline for submissions has now passed. All entrants will receive tailored feedback from an expert reader.
The winners will be announced in late Spring 2026. They will each be awarded £250 in book vouchers. Those who are short-listed will also receive a certificate of commendation.
If you have any queries please email us at:
Judged by Victoria Adukwei Bulley.
Winner
Noor Fatimah, Debden Park High School, Year 12, ‘The Reliquary at 14B’.
Brilliant and fiercely sustained use of language that speaks philosophically from the smallest of gestures. There is an incredible eye for the economy of language and the impact of brevity that is balanced with sentences that feel earned in both their length and imagery. This poem felt like a world within a world.
Runners Up
Safiyah Rofe, Woodford County High School, Woodford Green, Year 12, ‘Small Enough’.
Exciting use of language in ways that show a skilful sense of concision without resulting in poems that feel fractured or unhelpfully fragmentary. I found the smallest of phrases unendingly impressive, such as ‘Fear recruits the body young’ and ‘Smoke has no memory of flame’.
Connie McMillan, Tunbridge Wells Girls' Grammar School, Year 12, ‘Take Flight’.
I was taken aback by the sharpness of this poem’s astute observations about love, longing, and disappointment. McMillan’s eye is powerful and incisive, noticing how even the smallest and mundane of details can hold all the heartbreak of a lifetime.
Honourable Mention
Isabelle James, Chigwell High, Year 12, ‘The Butterfly’.
A hyper-sensory evocation of bliss and embodied self-actualisation that rises from the kind of darkness into which a seed is planted. A sustained and vivid account of rebirth.
Judged by Will Bowers and Ed Charlton.
Winner
Lucy Nicholas, Northampton High School, Year 12, ‘The Flight of the Lisbon Girls’
This was a clever and well-thought out essay on flight in The Virgin Suicides. You clearly know the text well and quote from it very effectively. One of the highlights of the essay was your ability to effectively discuss narrative voice, and your ability to get a relatively small metaphorical idea of 'flight' and make it work for the whole novel.
Runners Up
Marissa Kabir, London Academy of Excellence, Year 12, ‘Flight from The Father’.
This was a very good essay on 'Things Fall Apart' and Freud, which read the text sensitively and marshalled a clear and structured argument. You cleary plan your argument very well and find the right quotations to support your analysis.
Maya Holmes, St Dunstan's College, Year 12, ‘The Illusion of Escape’.
A very good essay about a difficult and complicated text, in which you manage pull out what makes James's story a haunting and claustrophobic text, and I was particularly interested in the sections in which you discuss the novel's structure.
Honourable Mention
Hattie Whitbread, Rochdale Sixth Form College, Year 12, ‘Grief in 'The Raven'’.
You discovered so much in Poe's raven that helped to unlock the nature of grief. This was a remarkably rich reading and enabled you to probe the poem thoughtfully. I particularly enjoyed those moments in which you pressed at the contradictions implied by the bird as a flightless figure in the poem. This was key and gave your essay a sharp focus, I thought.