Deadline for submissions 23:59 (BST) 7th June 2025
1st prize £400
2nd prize £75
3rd prize £25
Our judge, Vanessa Lampert, will also select up to 12 additional entries to be published alongside the prize-winners in a special issue of The Passionfruit Review.
Results will be announced within a month of the deadline.
about the theme:
“Why write love poetry in a burning world? To train myself, in the midst of a burning world, to offer poems of love to a burning world” – Katie Farris
The Passionfruit Review is, first and foremost, a place for love poetry. For this contest, we are calling for love poems that engage with the world around us, with the here and now.
We want to read everything about the world around you, from the domestic to the global. Send us poems about your kitchen table, your favourite tree, the cracks in your ceiling; send us your existential dread, your nascent optimism, your pains, your fears, your comforts and your commute. Tell us what it means for you to exist in the world at this moment in time.
As always, we are open to broad interpretations of the theme: feel free to surprise us and to stretch our imaginations!
ABOUT THE JUDGE:
Vanessa Lampert is an Acupuncturist, mentor, editor and teacher of poetry. Her work is widely published including in Magma, The Oxford Times, The Rialto, The London Magazine, Under the Radar, Oxford Poetry, and Poetry London. She runs workshops nationwide for adults and in schools. During the pandemic she taught poetry to schoolchildren in India via Zoom.
In 2023 she was commissioned to write the lyrics for an Unthanks song dedicated to the NHS.
She was a co-founder of The Alchemy Spoon magazine and volunteers at Oxford Poetry Library and in schools across Oxfordshire.
Since 2020 Vanessa has won the Café Writers prize, the Edward Thomas prize, the Sentinel prize and the Ver Poetry prize (twice). She has been placed in many other prizes including
commendations in the Troubadour, Magma, Bridport, Verve, and National Poetry Competitions.
Vanessa’s pamphlet On Long Loan’ was published by Live Canon in 2020 and her full collection ‘Say It With Me’ was published by Seren in 2023. Poems from the collection have been published in the Daily Telegraph poem of the week and the Forward Prizes anthology 2024.
She has recently edited a collection of poems about wellbeing for Candlestick Press.
You can find more on her website
Submission Guidelines
- The entry fee is £3 per poem, or £5 for 3. If the fee prevents you from entering the contest, get in touch with us at editor@passionfruitreview.com
- Submissions are open to all poets writing in English.
- Poems must be previously unpublished.
- Strong language is fine – abusive or discriminatory language is not.
- Simultaneous submissions are welcome – just let us know promptly through the submissions manager if you need to withdraw any of your poems.
- Poems up to 40 lines will be considered (we consider longer poems as general submissions!)
- All unsuccessful entries will also be considered for future publication in The Passionfruit Review.
