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

A competition for new writers that promised a £20,000 prize fund appears to have shut down, leaving winners and judges, including a Booker prize-winning novelist, out of pocket.

Established in 2022, the Plaza Prizes last year offered 10 awards that were judged by the “finest poets and writers in the world”.

However, some of the judges for the 2025 competition say they were not paid, and a number of winners say they had their entries withdrawn after being accused of using AI to create their work – allegations they strenuously denied.

One judge, the 2021 Booker prize winner Damon Galgut, described the competition as a “scam” after he did not get paid for his work judging a fiction section of the annual competition.

Anthony Joseph, who won the 2022 TS Eliot poetry prize, also says he was not paid for his work.

The Plaza Prizes website as it appeared recently. Photograph: Screengrab

The prizes were founded by Simon Kerr, a writer who previously worked for the University of Hull and ran another writing award that prompted a complaint over late payment.

Galgut, awarded the Booker prize for his novel The Promise, said he was promised £1,500 to judge the fiction competition last year and agreed as he thought such competitions helped fledgling writers to develop. His report and selected winners were subsequently published online.

When he and his agent made attempts to contact Kerr for payment, there was no response. Kerr responded eventually to say that Galgut had not invoiced him in a proper way and committed to paying 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 dismissed Kerr’s claims and told him that he had “disappeared without a trace the moment payment was mentioned”. Kerr then demanded Galgut withdraw the request for payment, threatened to sue him for defamation and harassment, and said the author was “not a reasonable actor”.

Joseph said he judged the audio poetry prize, and sent in the results of his work and invoiced Kerr in September for £1,250, but there was no response. He then took a case to the small claims court.

Kerr responded to the claim to say that the work was late, vague and incomplete; that Joseph had sent “coercive and threatening emails”; and that he had caused reputational damage to the prize. Joseph said the work was late because of a car accident he was in and said claims about the tone of his emails were exaggerated.