Creative Writing Competition 2025
All students, alumni, Fellows, Common Room Members, and staff of Kellogg College are invited to submit an original piece of creative writing for the fifth annual Kellogg College Creative Writing Competition, in association with the Kellogg College Centre for Creative Writing.
This year’s competition is extra special as it is set to coincide with the 20th anniversary of Oxford University’s ground-breaking creative writing course – the Master of Studies in Creative Writing, founded and directed by Kellogg Fellow Dr Clare Morgan. The MSt welcomed its first intake in September 2005, and has subsequently gone from strength to strength to become recognized as one of the leading creative writing offerings globally. Alumni successes have ranged from the youngest ever writer to be shortlisted for the Booker prize, to two-book deals with Faber, poetry competition and publication successes, significant achievements in dramatic writing and a stellar reputation in non-fiction publications too.
Kellogg is a hub for creative writing, attracting not only high numbers of creative writing students but writers and lovers of writing from across the University and beyond, through its regular series of events run by the Centre for Creative Writing. The competition has become a regular highlight and we’re especially pleased to mount the competition again in this 20th anniversary celebratory year.
The theme of the competition is ‘Celebration’, which can be interpreted however you like.
Submissions can be in any form or genre, including poetry, fiction, flash fiction, drama and non-fiction, but they must be written in response to the set topic and must be entire pieces in themselves (and not a section of a longer piece). Poems must be 40 lines or fewer, prose must be 500 words or fewer, and dramatic pieces should last for no more than 2 minutes.
Entries must be submitted to events@kellogg.ox.ac.uk by 5 pm, on Wednesday 21 May 2025 (Week 4, TT). The competition opens for submissions: Tuesday 1 April 2025. The competition finale will take place on Wednesday 25 June, when short-listed candidates will read/perform their submissions and the judging panel will announce winners and handout prizes. Our judging panel is to be confirmed, and competition prizes are in the form of book vouchers.