The Oxford Poetry Prize is awarded annually for a single poem in the English language.

The winner receives a cash prize of £2,000, the runner-up receives £1,000, and the second runner-up receives £500. All prize-winners will be offered publication in Oxford Poetry. The 2026 competition opened on 01 May and closes at midnight UTC on 31 August 2026. This year’s guest judge is Rowan Ricardo Phillips.

 How to submit:

• Entries should consist of one poem per uploaded file.
• There is no limit to the number of poems any individual may submit. Entrant have the option of submitting more than one poem as part of a single submission, as long as each poem is uploaded in a separate file (as above).
• Each poem costs £10 to submit.
• The only acceptable file format is PDF.
• Entries are accepted through this Submittable form only.
• Each poem submitted may comprise a maximum of 60 lines (not including titles, epigraphs, or blank lines).
• Since submissions are read blind, please do not include your name or any identifying information in the documents you upload. You  should include this information only in the Title or Cover Letter field of the Submittable form.
• Note that if you click the Withdraw button on Submittable, you are withdrawing your entire submission from consideration, not just a single poem. If you need to withdraw only a single poem in your submission, please send us a message through Submittable saying which poem you would like to withdraw. If you send us an email rather than a message through Submittable, it will not be linked to your submission and may be overlooked.
• If you are having trouble proceeding to the payment page, try hitting the ‘Save Draft’ button at the bottom of the page. That should activate the ‘Continue to Payment’ button.
• UPDATE: A limited number of free entries was made available to low-income writers on a first-come first-served basis, and have now all been claimed.
• If you are submitting from outside the UK, please keep in mind that the competition deadline on 31 August is midnight in the time standard UTC (same as the time zone GMT).

Eligibility:

• The competition is open to poets age 18 or over (on the date of their submission) living anywhere in the world.
• Poems submitted must be the entrant’s own original work, and must not have been generated, in whole or in part, by an artificial intelligence, chatbot, or other natural language processing software.
• Submitted poems must not have been previously published elsewhere, in print or online (including, but not limited to, blogs, websites, and social media).
• The following are disqualified from submitting to the prize: former editors of Oxford Poetry; the magazine’s current senior editorial team and members of their immediate family including spouses/partners; family members including spouses/partners, and current or past students of this year’s guest judge.
• Submission of a poem to the 2026 Oxford Poetry Prize constitutes the entrant’s acceptance of the competition’s full Terms and Conditions.