Member's Spring 2025 Writing Competition
Member's Spring Writing Competition
Guidelines
Entries close 5 pm, Friday 13 November 2026
Submit your entries via the form below
The contest is for members only. Become a member
Maximum word count: 500 words (poems max 20 lines)
Max 2 submissions per member
Winners announced late September.
Prizes
First Prize: $100
Second Prize: $75
Third Prize: $50
Winning entries will be published on the Hunter Writers’ Centre website.
Writing Prompts
Write a piece inspired by one of the quotes or images below
Do you know what a beautiful thing a house is? How it shelters, how it defines, how it contains?
― Trent Dalton, Boy Swallows Universe
How do we live with the weight of this history? How do we not fall prey to soul-destroying vengeance and resentment, yet never relent in our righteous demand for justice?
― Stan Grant
I want to be the one doing the looking. I have developed a whole social demeanour with the aim of deflecting attention from my appearance, I actively dislike being looked at.
― Helen Garner, Stories: The Collected Short Fiction
There is any amount of love and good in the world, but you must search for it. Being misunderstood is one of the trials we all must bear. I think that even the most common-minded person in the land has inner thoughts and feelings which no one can share with him, and the higher one’s organization the more one must suffer in that respect.
― Miles Franklin, My Brilliant Career
There is a woman on a train, weeping.
― Robyn Rowland, Lost, Grieve Vol. 13
Early summer, the wind drops jacaranda blossoms / onto the open verandah’s polycarb roof, a mauve filter.
― Greg McLaren, Late sonnets, Newcastle Poetry Prize 2026
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