George Crabbe Poetry Competition 2025

The 2025 George Crabbe Poetry Competition will open on Wednesday, 01 January 2025 and close on Friday, 13 June 2025.

The adjudicator will be Elizabeth Cook.

Photo: Peter Everard Smith

Elizabeth Cook has written poetry, fiction, and libretti and was the editor of the Oxford Authors John Keats. Her fiction includes Achilles, which won a Fringe First when performed in Edinburgh, and Lux. She was librettist for Francis Grier’s The Passion of Jesus of Nazareth, commissioned by BBC Radio 3, and has published two full collections of poetry, Bowl, and When I Kiss the Sky as well as a pamphlet, The Sound of the Rain. She has written critical essays and reviews and has taught in universities, prisons, and a Franciscan friary. She was St Edmundsbury Cathedral’s first Writer in Residence, has been a Hawthornden Fellow and a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Queen Mary University. Poetry is at the heart of her work, and she recommends reading aloud and learning poems by heart to create an inner store for rainy days.