The 2020 Cheshire Prize for Literature Awards Evening will be held on June 25 at Storyhouse with poet Daljit Nagra as our guest speaker.

The event will be live streamed: click here to watch the live stream.

If you would like a link to the awards please email cheshireprize@chester.ac.uk.
Winners will be listed here on June 28.

Some artists and writers have struggled, like many, and again, like many, they have used the situation as an opportunity to pause, reflect and create. We felt it important to offer a platform for the variety of writing that is happening. So this year the Prize has opened up its digital doors, in collaboration with Storyhouse, to accept digital submissions from all four categories of the past four years: poetry, short fiction, children’s literature and scriptwriting. The judges, William Stephenson* , Alex Clifton* , and Si Poole* , will choose one winner from each category. They will be looking particularly for original and inspiring responses to all aspects of the pandemic including “lockdown” and what has become for us all the “new normal”.

History of the Prize

The Cheshire Prize for Literature was founded in 2003 by the then High Sheriff, John Richards OBE DL, and Dr Bill Hughes from the University of Chester. It is open to people with a connection to the historic Cheshire boundary (including Wirral). It is one of the few free-to-enter literary competitions and offers not only a significant cash prize for the winner but also the rare opportunity for the best entries from the previous year to be published professionally by the University of Chester Press in an anthology edited by a senior member of academic staff.

Traditionally operating on a triennial cycle of short stories, poetry and children’s literature, in 2019 a new category for scriptwriting was introduced. The University was delighted to form a partnership with Storyhouse, which forms such an important new part of the cultural offering in Cheshire.