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As you may already know, this year marks the 450th anniversary of Britain’s most-loved playwright, William Shakespeare. To celebrate, we’ll be publishing a special Shakespeare issue of Litro in April, with contributions from actor, producer and writer Ben Crystal, Shakespearean scholar Pauline Kiernan, and novelist Jenn Ashworth, among others.
You could be part of Litro’s Shakespeare issue too. We’re looking for some Shakespearean sonnets to publish online to accompany our Shakespeare issue, and there are some impressive prizes up for grabs.
We want you to don your Renaissance wig, pick up your quill, and pen a poem in the true Shakespearean tradition. It can be on any theme – we’d love to see a poem on the Bard himself, or a modern take on the traditional love sonnet – but it must follow the rules for the Shakespearean (English) sonnet. You can find more on the form here, but here are the main points to remember:
– 14 lines
– rhyming scheme ababcdcdefefgg
– written in iambic pentameter (accents on every second syllable)
We will pick five winners from the entries received. The winning poems will be published on Litro Online to tie in with our Shakespeare issue mid-April; the winners will each receive a copy of Ben Crystal’s excellent book Shakespeare on Toast: Getting a Taste for the Bard (£7.99 pbk/ebook, published by Icon), and a free ticket to our latest Litro Live! event.
The Litro Live! event will be held at the English Speaking Union in Mayfair on 23rd April, and includes readings by Glen Duncan, Emma Jane Unsworth, Charlie Hill and Maia Jenkins.
Entries must be received by midnight on 10th April at the latest, and must be submitted via our Submittable page here.
NOTE: This competition has now closed.
