Closing date 16th June 2008

Competition Rules

1. Entrants may submit as many poems as they wish. €5 per poem. Cheques or postal orders made payable to Boyle Arts Festival.
2. Prizes are €300 for the winning poem and €50 for the four runners up. In addition there will be ten highly recommended poems. Prizes will be awarded on Sunday 27th July at a ceremony during the Boyle Arts Festival. All winners will be invited to attend and to read their poem.
3. All poems must be the unpublished, original work of the author.
4. Poems must be typed on one side of A4 paper.
5. Maximum length of poem is 40 lines
6. Each entry must be accompanied by an entry form or a photocopy of it. The name of the entrant must not appear on the poem itself.
7. The judge's decision is final.
8. Entrants are reminded to keep copies of their work as poems cannot be returned
9. Submission of a poem implies the competitor's acceptance of the rules.

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Entry Form

Name:
Address:

Tel No.
Mobile:
Email:

Title(s)
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Please return Entries to Poetry Competition, Boyle Arts Festival, King House, Boyle, Co. Roscommon
Note: Entry forms can be downloaded at www.boylearts.com

Guest Poet and Adjudicator Peter Fallon

Peter Fallon was born in 1951 and grew up on a farm near Kells in County Meath. He is a graduate of Trinity College, Dublin, where he has taught as Writer Fellow. At the age of eighteen, in 1970, he founded The Gallery Press, Ireland's leading literary publishing company. With Derek Mahon, he edited the best-selling Penguin Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry (1990). His own books include News of the World: Selected and New Poems (1998), The Georgics of Virgil (a Poetry Book Society Recommended translation, 2004, reissued in Oxford World's Classics, 2006) and The Company of Horses (2007).

Peter Fallon was the inaugural Heimbold Professor of Irish Studies at Villanova University. A member of Aosdána, he lives with his family in Loughcrew in County Meath.

A Poetry Reading by Peter Fallon will take place on Sunday 27th July at the Royal Hotel at 12.30pm. The reading will be followed by the presentation of prizes to the winner and runners up of the 2008 Boyle Arts Festival Poetry Competition and by readings of the winning and highly recommended poems.

Peter will also be running a Poetry workshop after the reading

The Assembly of a Poem

By close attention to the participants' own submissions this workshop focuses on the way a poem grows, or is assembled, and on techniques, those strategies by which ideas and feelings are translated into language. It considers also a wider assembly - a poem's relationship with other poems, with the community in which its author lives, and with the tradition it extends.

Founder and publisher of Ireland's leading poetry press, Peter Fallon possesses a unique gift as an editor

Please indicate if you are interested in attending the workshop as places will be limited. Yes/No

The Boyle Arts Festival will also include readings by John Banville, Bernard MacLaverty and local writers, see www.boylearts.com for more information or email info@boylearts.com to be included on our mailing list.