Have you got a book in you? So long as it’s not a novel, Cumbria Community Foundation would love to hear from you. They’re looking for applications for this year’s Hunter Davies Bursaries – three awards of £1,000 each to any aspiring writer working on a Cumbrian non-fiction project, or even just mulling one over. Writers don’t have to be living in the county, but the book must have a Cumbrian connection. The closing date for submissions is 10 May.

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The Melita Hume Poetry Prize is an award of £1,000 plus a publishing deal with Eyewear Publishing, for the best first full-length collection by a young poet (35 years of age or under) writing in the English language. It’s free to enter, and the closing date is 13 May.

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Here’s a digest of poetry competitions with submission deadlines coming up in the next few weeks, courtesy of the Saison Poetry Library on the South Bank. Picks of the bunch: the SCJ Poetry Award, Poetry London, and Poetic Republic competitions (£1,000 each), the Ware and Vers competitions (each offering £600), and the Manchester-based Poets and Players Prize (£400), which this year is being judged by Cumbrian poet Jacob Polley.

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Barely five minutes since Cumbrian poet Polly Atkin wins the 2012 Mslexia Women’s Pamphlet Competition, and the next one’s being announced, along with the magazine’s bumper Women’s Poetry Competition.

There’s a £2,000 top prize for the latter if judge Kathleen Jamie likes the cut of your jib, and £250 plus publication for pamphleteers.

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Written a book about Cumbrian widgets in the last year? Then get it entered for the prestigious Lakeland Book of the Year Awards, open to any book so long as it’s about or set in Cumbria in some way, shape, or form. If it is about widgets, it’d better be good – past winners include A.W. Wainwright (pictured), Harry Griffin, and Sarah Hall. Melvyn Bragg managed a commendation in 1988 for The Maid of Buttermere, but failed to scoop a prize. Read more >>

Blake Morrison judges the 2013 competition, organised in association with Words by the Water. First prize is £350, and eight commended poets receive a hundred quid’s worth of books. This year is the competition’s 10th anniversary. To celebrate the fact, the theme is taken from this line by latterday Mirehouse fan Alfred, Lord Tennyson: “I am a part of all that I have met.” (That’s Tennyson in the picture, taken soon after his meeting with James Butler Hickok.)

The closing date is 7 February. Click here to read last year’s winners, and here >> for how to enter.

The 2013 competition offers a first prize of £2,000 plus, as optional extras, a week’s writing retreat at Chawton House Library and a day with a Virago editor.

Second prize bags £500, third gets £250, and three other finalists win £100 each. All winning stories will be published in issue 58, the Jun/Jul/Aug 2013 edition of Mslexia. The judge is Janice Galloway, and the closing date is 18 March 2013. Read more and enter >>