The winner of the Bridport Poetry Prize is awarded £5,000.  The Manchester Poetry Competition has a top prize of £10,000. The Poetry Society awards £16,000 in prize money every year. There are many others. In fact, there is over £100,000 prize money for poetry awarded every year.

Winning a poetry competition is a great way into the publishing and literary industries. Many poetry prizes offer lucrative prize money.

This weekend course takes you through the art, craft and business of writing poems and winning prizes. It will look at a range of recent prize-winning poems and analyse the technical and literary devices that are being utilised for affect. It will then turn to the substance of the poems, before focusing on your own work and applying lessons learned to your writing.

The two-day course will be led by award-winning, bestselling and critically acclaimed writer, Michael Stewart. He is the author of nine books, including four novels and two poetry collections. He is the winner of the BBC Alfred Bradley Bursary Award, The Guardian’s Not-the-Booker Award, the H.E. Bates Short Story Prize, and many other awards. He was head of Creative Writing at the University of Huddersfield for nearly 20 years, and has taught the art, business and craft of poetry for 18 years. He is the editor-in-chief of Grist Books and has edited many poetry anthologies, including the recent We’re All In It Together. He is now the director of the Brontë Writing Centre.

February 21-22 2026 £125 (in Haworth)

February 28 – March 1 2026 £95 ONLINE

Enquiries and booking: brontewritingcentre@outlook.com