THE MELBOURNE SHAKESPEARE SOCIETY: Sonnet 155 Competititon

The Society is Celebrating 125 years

155TH SONNET COMPETITION

Winner: $300. Runner-up: $100.

OK, so it’s four hundred years since Thomas Thorpe published Shakespeare’s sonnets along with “A Lover’s Complaint”, and people are still finding their own emotions in them, still questioning the situations which inspired them, still transforming their creative energy into theses, fictions, scripts, paintings, and music.

To celebrate this anniversary, the Melbourne Shakespeare Society invites entries to a competition for the 155th SONNET.

Competitors are free to interpret the need for a 155TH SONNET, for instance, to include sonnets “in Shakespeare’s voice”, comments on love, the sonnet, us and the times of Shakespeare – and so on. The judges acknowledge the creative variation of the sonnet form as practised in Shakespeare’s time and since. The judges’ decision is final.

Entries: A previously unpublished sonnet, titled or sub-titled “The 155th Sonnet”.
Format: Each sonnet in typescript on one side of an A4 sheet of paper. The poet’s name must not be on this sheet, but supplied with address and contact details (email/phone) on a separate sheet of paper, with title and opening line of the poem.

Closing date: Entries must be posted December 1 or earlier (date extended).
Entry fee: Four x 55c unused Australian postage stamps with each sonnet.
Send to: Melbourne Shakespeare Society 155th Sonnet Competition, P.O.Box 231, Mont Albert VIC 3127

The judges are Kevin Brophy and Judith Rodriguez. The winner and runner-up will be announced at the end of the 1pm, December 12 reading of “The Rape of Lucrece” by the Melbourne Shakespeare Society, at the English-Speaking Union, 146 West Toorak Road, South Yarra 3181.

At the Society’s 2pm December 19 meeting at St Francis’ Pastoral Centre, Lonsdale St, the prize-winning poems will be read, if possible by the poets, and released in print in The Melbourne Shakespearean; writers of other entries may be invited to read or be published. Publication at ASA rates; copyright remains with the poets.