Attention Songwriters! The Allingham Songwriting Contest is now open!

The Allingham Festival Songwriting Contest is back, offering songwriters the opportunity to win €1000!

Songwriters are invited to submit their entries using our online entry system or by CD. We welcome music of all styles. The deadline for entries is September 30th. A shortlist of entrants will then be invited to perform in our live final which will be held on Friday November 4th 2016.

The winner on the night will walk away €1000 richer, and will also be invited to perform again in our Saturday night concert the following evening. 

Visit allinghamfestival.com/songwriting for more info and for a list of rules. 

Here's a video of the 2015 winner Niamh Mc Kinney performing her song 'Down Near the Sea' in last year's live final, introduced by John Meehan, with judges Cathy Jordan, Ian Smith and Chanel Mc Guinness.

Fiction & Poetry Winners

Just before we launch this year's Allingham Festival Fiction & Poetry competitions, why not have a read of the winners in both competitions from 2015 and 2014? The winning entries from both years are available to read on our website (finally!) on the Fiction & Poetry page. 

Valerie Cox will deliver the 2016 Allingham Lecture

View fullsize

The Allingham Festival Committee are delighted to announce that Valerie Cox will deliver the 2016 Allingham Lecture. Valerie is well-known to radio listeners around the country as an investigative reporter on prime time RTÉ shows such as Morning Ireland, the Today with Seán O'Rourke Show and the Pat Kenny Show. Valerie recently retired from RTÉ after twenty years with the broadcaster, although it is highly likely that she will continue to contribute and produce programmes on a freelance basis. We are delighted that she has agreed to deliver this year's Allingham lecture. The subject and further details of the lecture will be announced later in the year.

Songwriting, Poetry & Fiction Competitions

We're delighted to announce that this year will see the return of the Allingham Songwriting Contest, as well as our Poetry and Flash Fiction competitions. More details will follow soon. 

The standard of entries in the songwriting contest was exceptionally high last year, and we hope to showcase a few of these on our YouTube channel in coming weeks.

In addition, we are working on a more permanent online home for the excellent stories and poems we have received over the years.

So, if you have a song, a poem or a story which you'd like to enter, it's time to start getting it in shape for entry. The songwriting contest will culminate in a live final as part of the festival in November, while the results of the poetry and fiction competitions will be released a couple of weeks in advance of the awards ceremony on the Saturday night of the festival weekend. 

Open Call Deadline April 30th

Time is running out to respond to our open call for proposals. The deadline for the Open Call is midnight April 30th, so if you haven't got around to it yet, now is the time to apply. 

Follow the link:

www.allinghamfestival.com/open-call/