Blacktown City Council presents
2026
Mayoral
Creative
Writing
Prize
Welcome to the Mayoral Creative Writing Prize 2026. This prize is open to adults and children (aged 8 to 17 years) who live in Blacktown City. The poems and short stories must be works of fiction.
All entries can be either poetry or short stories. They will be judged in the following age categories:
- 8 – 11 years,
- 12 – 14 years,
- 15 – 17 years
- adult (18+)
Theme: ALL OUT
Weave your ideas, experiences and imaginings based on this theme into your short story or poem. Enter now!
Prizes
The total prize pool is $2,400. Winners aged 17 or younger will receive $200. The school they attend will receive a corresponding $100 as an incentive to encourage the budding authors of our local area. Adult winners will receive $300. All winners and highly commended writers will have their work published in 2026 Blacktown Mayoral Anthology by WestWords.
Announcement of the prize winners
The presentation ceremony took place on
Thursday, 26 November, 6pm at Max Webber Library. All winners and highly commended recipients were invited to attend.
Submission criteria
1. The work must be original and completed in the last 6 months and unpublished in any other source, including school newsletters, prior to the presentation ceremony on Thursday, 26 November, 2026.
Entries can be either:
• poem, maximum of 25 lines
• short story, maximum of 500 words.
2. You are ineligible to enter if you have won in 2024 or 2025.
3. Only one entry per person is permitted in each category.
4. Each entrant must have one entry per online form.
5. The judges’ decision is final and no correspondence will be entered into.
6. All participants will receive a letter acknowledging the receipt of their entry and their participation. A presentation ceremony will be held on Thursday, 26 November, 2026, where the winners will be announced.
7. Submit entries with a completed entry form online via this link.
Judging
Your work will be judged on how original it is, how you have constructed your story or poem, the use of language, (including creative expression, grammar, sentence structure, punctuation and spelling), the way you have developed characters, atmosphere, or setting or used words in a creative way and how it relates to the theme.
An independent judging panel will assess all submissions.
The Blacktown Mayoral Writing Prize will not accept any work generated or edited by A.I. (large language models). Several layers of plagiarism tools are applied to every entry, as well the discernment of our judges. Any work discovered to be A.I. generated will be disqualified.
Short stories exceeding the 500 words limit, or poems longer than 25 lines will also be disqualified. An independent judging panel will assess all submissions.
This program is proudly supported by Blacktown City Council and WestWords.
For more information, please contact WestWords: Western Sydney’s Literature Development Organisation, on:
1800 937 896
admin@westwords.com.au
