The Aurora Prize for Writing 2025

The Aurora Prize for Writing 2025 is now open for entries! This year, Writing East Midlands is accepting short stories of up to 2,000 words per entry and poetry of up to 60 lines per entry; in any genre, on any subject! Aurora is a national competition open to writers aged 18 and above.

Prizes for the first-place winner include £500 in cash, feedback from a leading literary agent or editor on a piece of work of their choice, a year’s free membership to the Society of Authors, an SoA advisory session and free tickets to a masterclass with one of this year’s judges!

Our second-place winner will receive £150 in cash; third-place will be awarded a free ticket to The Writers’ Conference 2027; and the regional winner (from the East Midlands) will be offered £100 in cash. Winners will be announced in each category (poetry/prose). A longlist (of 25 in each category) and a shortlist (of 10 in each category) will be published online on the Writing East Midlands website.

We’re thrilled to reveal that our judges for the 2025 creative writing competition are none other than T.S. Eliot Prize winner Joelle Taylor, judging our poetry entries, and 2020 Caine Prize winner and former Vice Chair of the Royal Society of Literature Irenosen Okojie, judging for prose. You can find out more about judges on the Aurora Prize webpage here.

As part of this year’s competition, both judges will each be delivering an online masterclass on their chosen craft (poetry/prose) in December 2025 after announcing the winners of the competition at the Aurora Prize for Writing Awards Ceremony (details TBC). First-place winners in each category will be offered a free ticket to the masterclass of their choosing. Both masterclasses will be a great chance to listen to the expert advice of these award-winning writers and find out what the judges of an international writing competition are looking for in a winning entry. Keep an eye out for more details on each masterclass coming soon!

For the first time ever, we’ll also be offering our shortlisted entrants a 20% discount code for Society of Authors membership, courtesy of the SoA. We are incredibly grateful to our partners, the Society of Authors, for their generous offer to our winners and for making the Aurora Prize a true celebration of writers and writing!

The Aurora Prize for Writing is a fantastic opportunity to get your work out there and your name recognised, while also being an eye-catching accolade to keep under your belt when approaching agents. Previous winners include saga and cosy crime author Glenda Young and HarperCollins-published literary fiction author Ella King.

Entries to the Aurora Prize for Writing 2025 are £9 per first entry and £7 per additional entry, with a maximum of 6 entries to be submitted per writer.