The Poetry Trust has been running an annual competition to encourage Suffolk’s young poets since 1989, the first year of the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival. The competition is free to enter, allows a maximum of three poems per entrant, and is open to all young poets living in Suffolk or attending a Suffolk school during the year (4 – 18 yrs old).

In 2011, we received 650 entries from 33 schools and we were delighted to award a total of ten prizes (£20 book tokens) and to invite each winner to read his or her poem at the opening Family Reading at the 23rd Aldeburgh Poetry Festival. Hearing poems by young poets at the very start of their writing lives is the traditional opening to the Festival programme which always spans the fullest range of poetry and poets. This year’s winners – aged 8 to 15 – delivered terrific poems from the main stage on Friday 4 November 2011 to a packed Jubilee Hall audience, and certainly were a hard act for Roger McGough to follow!

For the first time, Bramfield Primary School achieved the great distinction of being the school with the strongest overall entry – for which they received the Hardiman Scott Cup, awarded annually by The Suffolk Poetry Society.

All the prizewinning poems were featured in a National Poetry Day double page spread in the East Anglian Daily Times which has sponsored the Aldeburgh Young Poets Competition from the very beginning. And you can read them here.

Details of next year’s Aldeburgh Young Poets Competition will be available in Spring 2012. But for interested teachers and prospective entrants, have a look at last year’s Entry Leaflet which has useful information about writing winning poems.