Newly launched:
Postcards Competition
Deadline for entries: 21 January, 2011
Judge: Nicola Barker

Please note: participating in this competition does not exclude entrants from also submitting abstracts to the conference (for more details about either type of submission, please visit our website www.postcards-letters.org.uk and follow the link to 'Postcards Competition' or 'Call for Papers')

Further information:
Postcards Competition
The 'Picture this: postcards and letters beyond text' conference is delighted to launch its Postcards Competition, a mixed-media writing competition, hosted in collaboration with the publishers Myriad Editions, which invites entrants to experiment with the postcard form and to explore relationships between the verbal and the visual.

The Postcards Competition welcomes any and all kinds of writing – fiction and/or non-fiction, poetry, fragment, cartoon, criticism, aphorism, autobiography, travel – as long as it fits onto a standard sized postcard and is addressed to someone. The pictorial aspect of the postcard can be original artwork (drawing, photography, collage, etc.), any found image, or a commercial picture postcard (antique or contemporary) that complements the writing. Postcards will be judged on how compelling the writing is and on how successfully the visual and verbal elements are brought together.

All entries will be read by the conference committee and will be judged by the novelist Nicola Barker, whose latest novel Burley Cross Postbox Theft (2010) is a comic epistolary. Results of the competition will be announced at the conference as part of an evening event, which will include a reading and exhibition of winning entries. Competition winners will participate in this event, which will be open to conference delegates and members of the public.

Nicola Barker’s judging comments will be made in correspondence to be read out on the evening. Key conference participants, including Victoria Blunden, editor at Myriad Editions, and other professionals - such as visual artists, creative writers, curators and other scholars - will also present comments on the winning entries. Winning entries will be published on the website of Myriad Editions and concurrently in the online academic journal Excursions.

The closing date for submissions is 21st January 2011. For more information and for how to enter, please visit our website www.postcards-letters.org.uk and follow the link to ‘Postcards Competition’. You can also email enquiries to us at enquiries@postcards-letters.org.uk.
We look forward to receiving your work!