Winners and judges out of pocket as £20,000 writing awards appear to have closed | Awards and prizes

A competition promising a £20,000 prize fund for new writers appears to have closed, leaving the winners and judges, including a Booker-winning novelist, broke.

Established in 2022, the Plaza Awards gave 10 awards last year, evaluated by “the world’s best poets and writers”.

However, some of the judges for the 2025 competition say they were not paid, and some of the winners say their entries were withdrawn after they were accused of using artificial intelligence to create their work; They vehemently denied these allegations.

One of the judges, 2021 Booker prize winner Damon Galgut, has described the competition as a “scam” after he was not paid for judging the fiction section of the annual competition.

Anthony Joseph, winner of the 2022 TS Eliot Poetry Prize, also says that he was not paid for his work.

The awards were founded by writer Simon Kerr, formerly of the University of Hull, who ran another writing prize that led to complaints about late payment.

Galgut, who won the Booker Prize for his novel The Promise, said he was promised £1,500 to judge a fiction competition last year and accepted the offer because he thought such competitions helped novice writers develop. The report and selected winners were later published online.

When he and his manager tried to contact Kerr for payment there was no response. Kerr eventually said Galgut did not bill him correctly and promised to pay him within 60 days. “Apparently, in your rarefied world, it was somehow up to me to pluck these elusive payment details from the Platonic ether,” he said in an email to Galgut.

Galgut denied Kerr’s claims and told him that “as soon as he was told the payment disappeared without a trace.” Kerr then demanded that Galgut withdraw his demand for payment, threatened to sue him for defamation and harassment, and said the writer was “not a reasonable actor.”

Joseph said he considered the audio poetry prize and sent the results of his work, billing Kerr for £1,250 in September, but received no response. He then took the case to the court of first instance.

Kerr responded to the claim by saying the study was late, unclear and incomplete; that Joseph sent “coercive and threatening emails”; and said the award damaged his reputation. Joseph stated that the work was delayed due to his traffic accident and that the claims about the tone of his e-mails were exaggerated.

Peter Doolan, winner of the audio poetry prize, was told he was disqualified because his entry was “flagged by AI content”. [detectors]“We cannot know for certain the extent (if any) of AI in the creation of this work,” an email told him, “but The Plaza Awards has a zero-tolerance policy for the use of generative AI.”

Doolan told Kerr that the AI ​​claim was “complete nonsense” and that his poem was first published in 2018.

Another award winner, who wished to remain anonymous, said they were disqualified for the same reason and received the same email. They “strongly deny” any use of AI and say they cannot use the technology. Both authors said they were not given the opportunity to prove the originality of their work.

Kerr received grants from the Society of Writers and the Royal Society of Literature that helped save her home from repossession after she lost her job during the pandemic, according to the awards website, which is not accessible this week.

He invested the capital from the subsequent home sale into Plaza Rewards, his website said.

“I’m so grateful to the community of writers for saving me from homelessness, poverty, and possibly suicide. (It also gave me a mission at the age of 53) at a time when a man needed a mission to stay halfway sane in a crazy world,” he said.

The award ceremony, planned to be held in Dordogne, France last October, was cancelled. The website said this was because a millionaire fantasy author withdrew his support for one of the awards due to the quality of entries submitted. The associated short story writing course was also canceled due to lack of donations. Kerr appealed for help with funding following an effort to raise money to publish a planned anthology.

In 2014, the Guardian reported that one of the winners of a writing competition run by Kerr was denied a prize and the awards ceremony was cancelled. The money was paid out shortly after the Guardian contacted the University of Hull, where he was working at the time.

Kerr, who gives his North London address of Islington on his website, did not respond to the Guardian’s questions about the Plaza Awards.