Only one month to go to Liberate Your Words!

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Only one month to go to Liberate Your Words!

Calling all Year 11, 12 and 13 students! Get your pens to paper because there is only one month to go until entries for the 2009 New Zealand Post National Schools Poetry Awards 2009 close on June 15.

The Awards celebrate young writing talent in New Zealand, and this year students are strongly encouraged to get involved regardless of their writing confidence, as great poems can come from anyone. The judges will be looking for poems that “lift” off the page through their freshness and interesting use of language.

All poems submitted to the competition will be judged under two categories, Best Poem and Best Lyric. There will be six finalists in each category from which the two winners will be selected.

Judged by Jenny Bornholdt, one of New Zealand’s most popular poets and a former Poet Laureate, the winner of Best Poem will receive $500 cash and a weekend for two at the New Zealand Post Writers and Readers Week in March 2010. The winner of the Best Lyric will win $500 cash and be flown to Auckland to spend two days working on the song in a professional recording studio with Best Lyric judge and musician Jason Kerrison from Opshop. The song will be serviced to radio stations nationwide and will be available on http://www.loop.co.nz for free download.

The two category winners’ schools will receive a $500 book grant for their libraries and the five runners-up in each category will win a cash prize of $100.

Jason Kerrison is looking forward to the competition and excited to see what gets submitted from his own lyric-writing point of view. "In my own writing I find the hard work begins after I've managed to trap the muse by pen or some type of recorder. That's where the editing and re-editing starts. And although it's the hair-pulling phase it's also the most satisfying and fulfilling moment when the sweat pays off and the lyric breathes life."

Students are able to enter the Awards online at http://www.nzpost.co.nz/poetryawards and are also encouraged to join the Awards Bebo group where a warm up Haiku competition is taking place http://www.bebo.co.nz/newz903.

The New Zealand Post National Schools Poetry Awards are supported by Tearaway magazine, the bNet, New Zealand Post Writers and Readers Week, the New Zealand Book Council, Booksellers New Zealand, the New Zealand Society of Authors and literary magazines Sport and Landfall.

Entries close on 15 June and winners will be announced on 28 August.

ENDS

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