The 2024 Hands up Project Poetry competition.

The Hands up Project’s 2024 poetry competition is now live! Here’s Alice and Peter Oswald’s blog post to introduce it.

A lot has happened since our last poetry competition. Poets have been killed, but poetry is not dead, it is alive and well in Gaza and everywhere else. Poets under siege and bombardment speak and write their poems to those outside. Those who have escaped speak poetry about their experiences. Heart speaks to heart across the world, no one is outside this catastrophe.

We have been holding online sessions where poets from different countries have shared their work; we have been astonished, impressed, moved to tears, and continue to be so. And so it seems time for another competition, to celebrate the sensitivity, intelligence and resilience of the poetry that continues to be written.

For the last Hands Up Project poetry competition, in 2023, poets were asked to respond to one or other of two paintings – one by Malak Mattar and one by Leyla el Hej Abed. That competition bore fruit in the form of the extremely popular book Moon Tell me Truth, which forms the basis of an exhibition currently touring the UK and Ireland. Time after time the poems have been spoken at exhibition openings and online to people all over the world, so that even the voices of the dead are not silenced.

This time we have two more paintings – the first is another by Leyla. It is of the beach at Gaza. Leyla was helped by a crowdfunder to leave Gaza a few months ago. She left two days before the Rafah crossing was closed, and is now studying at Debrecen University in Hungary. How she misses the sea! You will see from the painting how much it means to her – as it does to all the people of Gaza. You can see, in the painting, the tents of the people who have lost their homes. Her own family was there for a while.

 The second painting is by a young artist still in Gaza now, Nada Anwar Essa Rajab

So please respond to either (or both) of the paintings with your poetry, and decorate your handwritten poem with drawings or designs of your own. Please be under 18. And please make sure your poem is a maximum of 50 words. And remember, the painting is meant to set free your imagination, not tie it down. You can make your connection to the painting in the most surprising ways. The deadline for submissions is Friday 6th December 2024. Please send us a photo of your handwriiten poem to info@handsupproject.org

So lose yourselves in the paintings, and then – a decorated handwritten poem. Good luck and thank you for entering!

A summary of the rules.

1) The competition is open to young people around the world, whose first language is not English, and who are 17 years old or younger.

2) The poem must be handwritten (not typed) and it should include drawings or other forms of decoration.

3) The poem must be a maximum of 50 words long.

4) A photo of the poem must be sent to info@handsupproject.org by midnight Palestine time on the 6th December 2024.