McLellan Poetry Competition 2025
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Poems in English or Scots
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The McLellan Poetry Prize is awarded by the Arran Theatre and Arts Trust Ltd as part of the annual McLellan Arts Festival. Now in its seventeenth year, past judges have included Kathleen Jamie, Robert Crawford, Jackie Kay, Peter and Ann Sansom, Michael Laskey, Simon Armitage, David Constantine Maura Dooley and Sinéad Morrissey, Sean O’Brien, Luke Wright, Hollie McNish, Joelle Taylor, Jim Mckintosh and William Letford.
JUDGE: JIM CARRUTH
£1000 prizes for English poem and Scots poem
Commendations as Judge sees fit
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​Prize-winners will be notified individually before the end of July and invited to read at the award ceremony with Jim Carruth on the Isle of Arran on Friday, 29th August 2025
Closing date: 15th June 2025
Judge for 2025: Jim Carruth
Jim Carruth is a poet, editor and awards and events programmer. He is the co-founder and chair of St Mungo’s Mirrorball and has been an artistic advisor for StAnza. He is the current Poet Laureate of Glasgow and is the RLF Fellow at Glasgow University. His poetry has won a Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship; the James McCash poetry competition, the McLellan Poetry Prize and the Callum Macdonald prize.
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He has brought out four full collections and nine chapbooks. Killochries was shortlisted for the Saltire Scottish Poetry Book of the Year, the Seamus Heaney Centre For Poetry Prize and the Fenton Aldeburgh Prize. His latest collection Far Field came out in 2023.
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Previous Years
Judge Sean O'Brien with the many of the 2019 Winners and the Competition Organisers at the Prize Giving on Arran.
(from the right: Cicely Gill, Organiser; Sean O'Brien, Competition Judge; Jane Kinton, 3rd Prize; Kitty Donnelly, Commended; Pamela Brough, 1st Prize; James Caruth, Commended & David Underdown, Organiser.)
2018 winner Char March recorded her entry in Scots and English
Maura Dooley presents 1st Prize to 2017 winner Louise Greig
Jed Myers receiving 1st Prize from
David Constantine in 2016
