[Michael Juster]

Would it be fair to call the weekly Spectator poetry competitions "the largest and most competitive" of the newspaper poetry competitions in the UK?

[Matt Q]

No, since the Spectator is a magazine not a newspaper.

[Matt Q]

I'm only aware of two mainstream (i.e., non-poetry) magazines that run competitions in every issue: The Oldie (a monthly publication) and The Spectator (a weekly). The New Statesman (another weekly) used to have one, but their competitions stopped last year. I don't know which of the two gets the most entries, but likely someone else here does.

[Max Goodman]

Bill Greenwell, who stops by now and again, is something of an expert and historian of the comps. Though his main focus is the New Statesman, he would almost certainly have an answer to this question. A PM might reach him. A post in the Deep Drills Spectator forum might get an answer from someone even if Bill doesn't see it.

[Roger Slater]

I'm not sure what you mean by "most competitive." Personally, I always found it easier to win in the Speccie than the Oldie, but that may just be because my style happens to be more to the taste of the Speccie editor and not because there are more people competing for each spot.

[Maryann Corbett]

Originally Posted by Max Goodman

Bill Greenwell, who stops by now and again, is something of an expert and historian of the comps. Though his main focus is the New Statesman, he would almost certainly have an answer to this question. A PM might reach him. A post in the Deep Drills Spectator forum might get an answer from someone even if Bill doesn't see it.

Bill is also on Facebook and may be reachable that way.

[Rob Stuart]

Regular entrants in these competitions will know that the winners are almost entirely drawn from a pool of a few dozen people, about half of whom are Sphereians. Perhaps there are hundreds of people who submit stuff regularly but never get anywhere, though I doubt it.

The size of the postbags must vary considerably according to how appealing individual competitions are, and it's further complicated by lots of us submitting multiple entries under different pseudonyms so that we can't be seen to have won two (or more, in some cases) prizes in the same comp.

I'd guess the average entry is 20-40 individual pieces of work, but it would be interesting to know for sure. I wonder how these Brit comps compare with the one in The Washington Post?