Playwriting competitions – showcase or short change?

by guest blogger Elspeth Rushbrook

A great way to earn money and start your career? Well, not exactly.

Many competitions work on the assumption that what you the writer most wants is to be seen, and to be able to put on your CV/resume and website that you’ve been performed. But competitions seem to work on the same principle as voluntary work: that doing is a reward in itself and substitutes, if not eclipses, earning. ‘We’re charities, we get little money’, competition organisers say. And yet they’ll charge the public a fee to see the performance and pay their box office staff, but not their writers, and I fear nor do actors, directors, composers or stage crew receive money.

Sometimes, everybody BUT the writer gets money - and they've spent the longest creating the play!

Here are some British-based national open theatre writing competitions whose rules and ethos I query:

Windsor Fringe’s Kenneth Branagh award. Three plays are chosen for performance, one gets picked as winner and gets money. So it means that plays 2 and 3 are performed without prize or fee and cannot be put into other competitions, which almost invariably ask for unperformed works – a point the organisers don’t understand.

The Open and Youth winners along with the inaugural Mobile Phone winner of the world’s biggest photography competition, the Sony World Photography Awards, were announced 31 March, 2015.

L-R (c) Antoine Weis, Switzerland, Winner, Nature & Wildlife (c) Antony Crossfield, UK, Winner, Enhanced (c) Armin Appel, Germany, Winner, Architecture (c) Hector Muñoz Huerta, Mexico, Winner, Arts & Culture (c) Jaime Massieu, Spain, Winner, Split Second (c) Nick Ng, Malaysia, Winner, Low Light (c) Norman Quinn, UK, Winner, Panoramic (c) Saleh Rozati, Iran, Winner, People. (c) Wilson Lee, Hong Kong, Winner, Smile (c) Yasen Georgiev, Bulgaria, Winner, Travel
Drawn from the four corners of the world and covering a huge range of subjects, the winning photographers were chosen from over 96,000 entries to the 2015 Sony World Photography Awards.

Winning images to be shown at Somerset House, London 24 April – 10 May

The achievement of each of the 14 winners is extraordinary not only in terms of the competition they faced, but also the fact that these winners are largely not professional photographers; instead they are simply individuals who love photography. The youngest winning photographer is Stephanie Anjo from the United Kingdom who is just 14 years old and the winners are geographically spread from Mexico to Malaysia.

Don’t miss the opportunity to participate in the World’s richest photography competition. Select your best work, submit your photos and win a $150,000 Grand Prize. 

Submissions open July 1st, 2015.

"Global Photography Awards aims to promote the beauty of the photograph. It does not matter if the photo was shot in the past or shot in the present, framed by a professional or an amateur. Our desire is to find a one photograph that is worthy of the Grand Prize."

A "Rights On" competition

Global Photography Awards worked with Artists Bill of Rights to ensure entrants' rights will be properly respected, as listed in our Principles for Rights On competitions. Global Photography Awards will also preserve metadata and authorship, in addition to preserving image integrity, to every extent possible. View their terms for complete information.

The Artists' Bill of Rights wishes to thank British Airways on behalf of all those who reached out to them regarding the terms and conditions of their "Inspire Us" competition.

Although the terms do not fully comply with our Principles, they do represent such a significant improvement from the original that you may wish to consider entering.

Under the new, revised terms, only the winning image may be used for unrestricted commercial use by BA and its partners. Our understanding is that non-winning images will not be published or used in any way. If you consider this condition acceptable, you may wish to enter. The choice is always yours.

See our revised report for details.