ONE of Britain’s best-loved poets has set a big challenge for those eyeing up this year’s Bridport Prize- he wants to see something he would wish he’d written himself. 
Roger McGough, presenter of Radio 4’s Poetry Please, has laid down a challenge to writers by inviting them to pen a poem he’d be proud of.
Roger made his challenge as part of his role as poetry judge for this year’s prestigious Bridport Prize competition.
He has also made a short film to encourage writers to send in their entries. In it he says it takes courage to enter your writing into competitions, but that he hopes lots of writers will do and he is looking forward to reading the poems. 
The Bridport Prize, established in 1973, is one of the best-known ‘open’ writing competitions in the English language, meaning both new and established writers are eligible to submit work. It regularly attracts entries from as far away as the USA, Australia and New Zealand.
There are four categories to the competition: poetry (up to 42 lines max); short stories (up to 5,000 words); flash fiction (very short stories of 250 words max.) and the Peggy Chapman-Andrews Award for a First Novel (the opening chapters of a novel up to 8,000 words max.)
The judges for 2015 are Roger McGough for poetry and award-winning writers Jane Rogers for short stories, David Gaffney for flash fiction and Jane Feaver for novels.
The competition offers top prizes of £5,000 in the poetry and short story categories, £1,000 in the flash fiction and £1,000 plus up to a year’s mentoring from project partners The Literary Consultancy for the winner of the PC-A novel award.
The winning poems, short stories and flash fiction stories are published in a Winners Anthology in the autumn and the winner and runner-up in the novel award will have their opening chapters published on the Bridport Prize website.
The competition closing date is May 3.
Entries can be made online at bridportprize.org.uk/enter-online or by post by downloading an application form at bridportprize.org.uk/content/submit-post 
Winners will be notified by mid-September and formally announced at the Bridport prize-giving and online on October 17. 
The Bridport Prize is the flagship project of Bridport Arts Centre in Dorset and raises vital funds for the centre’s work.