Borderlines Book Festival 2019 sees a host of well-known and celebrated authors and poets welcomed to Carlisle City Centre from Thursday 26th September to Tuesday 8th October.
Alongside the fantastic range of events, talks and workshops, Borderlines is delighted to announce two competitions, poetry and photography, for all creative-minded members of the public to enter.
The poetry competition is a well-established element of the festival and attracts over 60 entries a year. 2019 sees the launch of a new photography competition to run alongside it -the theme for both competitions is ‘Change’, as chosen by the Borderlines committee. ‘Change’ can inspire many ideas and interpretations, from the environment and climate to natural landscapes and urban life.
Borderlines welcomes all interpretations of this broad-ranging theme and looks forward to receiving creative and unique contributions from all participants.
Entrants can enter both competitions simultaneously, and some participants may wish to submit a piece of poetry based on their photograph, and vice versa.
The first prize for the poetry competition is £250 and book tokens of £30 and £20 will be awarded to two runners-up for highly commended poems.
The competition will be judged by Cumbrian poet, Geraldine Green. Geraldine is an experienced creative writing tutor, editor and published poet. In 2019 she became the first writer-in-residence at the Quaker Tapestry Museum in Kendal and was also the first writer-in-residence at Brantwood, where she tutors residential creative writing courses. Her work has been translated into German and Romanian and is widely anthologised in the UK and USA. She has published three poetry collections and four pamphlets and her latest collection, Passing Through, was published in 2018 by Indigo Dreams.
The first prize for the photography competition is £100 and a copy of judge Ashley Cooper’s book, ‘Images from a Warming Planet’. Ashley is the only living photographer to have documented the impacts of climate change and rise of renewable energy on every continent. His work is used in newspapers and magazines all around the world. His 14 year self-funded project culminated in a crowd funding campaign to raise £45,000 to self-publish the award-winning ‘Images From a Warming Planet’.
Entries can be submitted via the Borderlines website’s competition page where full details of both competitions can be found: https://www.borderlinescarlisle.co.uk/competitions/
The fee to enter each competition is £5 and the last date for entries is August 31st.
The winners will be notified on September 28th.
For the poetry competition, the overall winner and the two runners up will be given the opportunity to read their poems at a poetry event during Borderlines on Saturday, October 5th. Borderlines will publish photographic entries on their website.
Festival Chair Anna Smalley said: “We are delighted to announce the return of the Borderlines Poetry competition, and excited to be able to launch a new initiative in the Photography Competition in the Festival’s sixth year. We have a wonderful creative community in Carlisle and Cumbria and we are looking forward to seeing the entries come in.”
