THE MELBOURNE SHAKESPEARE SOCIETY

Celebrating 125 years

155^TH SONNET COMPETITION

Winner: $300. Runner-up: $100.

OK, so it's four hundred years since Thomas Thorpe
published Shakespeare's sonnets along with "A Lover's Complaint", and people
are still finding their own emotions in them, still questioning the situations
which inspired them, still transforming their creative energy into theses,
fictions, scripts, paintings, and music.

To celebrate this anniversary,

the Melbourne Shakespeare Society invites entries to a competition for the

155^th SONNET.

Competitors are free to interpret the need for a 155^TH
SONNET, for instance, to include sonnets "in Shakespeare's voice", comments on
love, the sonnet, us and the times of Shakespeare - and so on. The judges
acknowledge the creative variation of the sonnet form as practised in
Shakespeare's time and since. The judges' decision is final.

Entries: A previously unpublished sonnet, titled or
sub-titled "The 155^th Sonnet".

Format: Each sonnet in typescript on one side of an
A4 sheet of paper. The poet's

name must not be on this sheet, but supplied with
address and contact details

(email/phone) on a separate sheet of paper, with title
and opening line of the poem.

Closing date: Entries must be posted December 1 or
earlier (date extended).

Entry fee: Four x 55c unused Australian postage
stamps with each sonnet.

Send to: Melbourne Shakespeare Society 155^th
Sonnet Competition,

P.O.Box 231, Mont Albert VIC 3127

The judges are Kevin Brophy and Judith Rodriguez. The winner
and runner-up will be announced at the end of the 1pm, December 12 reading of
"The Rape of Lucrece" by the Melbourne Shakespeare Society, at the
English-Speaking Union, 146 West Toorak Road, South Yarra 3181.

At the Society's 2pm December 19 meeting at St Francis'
Pastoral Centre, Lonsdale St, the prize-winning poems will be read, if possible
by the poets, and released in print in The Melbourne Shakespearean;
writers of other entries may be invited to read or be published. Publication at
ASA rates; copyright remains with the poets.

__________________________________________________________________

Sonneteers! 400 years after Shakespeare's Sonnets
were published, the Melbourne Shakespeare Society is holding a competition for
THE 155^TH SONNET. Winner $300, runner-up $100. Fee, each poem: 4 x
55c postage stamps. Post by December 1 (extended) to P.O.Box 231, Mont Albert
VIC 3127.

For more details, http://home.vicnet.net.au/~bard

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