Manchester Cathedral 600 Poetry Competition 2021

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Sharpen your pencil, polish your pen, hit the keyboard, the Manchester Cathedral 600 Poetry Competition is here! This year celebrates six centuries since the founding of the Collegiate Church which grew into our cathedral. We are celebrating the Cathedral - this extraordinary home of spiritual life and diversity, the beating heart of a vibrant city.


We are looking this year for poems which reflect, express or connect with the Cathedral in some way. Poems will be short – no more than 15 lines – so that we can make them really visible in the city and beyond. Poems you submit should be broadly religious or ‘spiritual’ in nature and, like all good religious poetry, appeal to those who might not describe themselves as ‘religious’. We would like to see poetry from different faith traditions, as well as from those struggling to discover a sense of the sacred. Write in any style or form – your poems will be judged solely on their merits as poetry.

And this year, rather than one winner and a lot of hopefuls, we will be simply offering TEN prizes of £100, and publishing the winning poems in a Celebration booklet.

Enter 2021 Competition

The Judges

This year's poems will be judged by a panel:

Robbie Burton


Robbie Burton began writing poetry in her 50s, gaining an MA at Liverpool Hope in 2003 and publishing the odd poem here and there the following year.

Someone Else's Street, published by HappenStance, is her first collection. Since 2009, she has run Cross Border Poets, a very successful Poetry Society stanza.

Her poems have appeared in a wide variety of magazines. Her work has appeared in the Quaker anthology A Speaking Silence (ed. R Bailey and S Krayer), The Book of Love and Loss (ed. R Bailey & J Hall) and other anthologies. Her poem Eternal Plane was commended in the 2010 Poetry Society Stanza Competition. Nun With Keys was highly commended in the 2019 Manchester Cathedral Poetry Competition, and her poem, Deeds, won 3rd prize in the 2018 Ledbury Poetry Competition.