As part of the 25th edition of their festival, the Poetry Africa Festival organised by the Centre for Creative Arts at the University of KwaZulu Natal invites anyone between 18 and 35 years of age to submit their slam poetry under the theme(s) “Unmute Democracy” and “Human Rights” as part of their yearly competition.
The festival looks forward to offering R10, 000.00 and an automatic entry to the 26th edition of Poetry Africa 2022 to the overall winner.
Participants can submit their entries by using the link below. The closing date for entries is Friday, 8 October at 5pm.
The Top 5 will be announced on the 12th of October and the winner will be announced during the Slam Jam finals on Saturday, 16 October 2021.
The winner of the 2021 Poetry Africa Slam Jam will be invited to Brussels and participate in the World Poetry Slam Championship in 2022
Rules and Regulations:
- Poems must be submitted in a form of a video (MP4, AVI).
- Poems must be original and be the poet’s own work.
- Submission videos should not have been submitted anywhere else (other digital slams/projects).
- Videos must be original and not contain other people’s copyrighted material.
- Poems must fall within the themes prescribed.
- Poets must prepare two videos, one for entry (round 1) and one which will be used should they advance to the Top 5 grand finale (round 2).
- Each poem/video must be no more than 3 minutes in length. The poets will have a 10 second grace period. Failure to keep to the length prescribed, the poet might be disqualified.
- Each poem/video must be no more than 100MB
- Poems should be suitable for young audiences. (Excessive violence, sexually explicit content, explicit language and/or degrading language to any group of people are discouraged).
- Poets must be residing within South Africa to be eligible to enter the competition.
- When requested, poets will be required to provide proof that they are indeed residents of South Africa, failure of which will result in their immediate disqualification from the competition.
- Due to the nature of submissions, props, costumes and/or instruments are permissible
- Poems can be in any of the official South African languages.
- Poets may not do introductions to their poems.
- Poets must be between the ages of 18 and 35.
- The top 5 scoring poets from the submissions will advance to the finale.
- Poets that advance to the finale may NOT repeat the poem used during submission.
- Poets who have competed in previous seasons of the competition may not compete with the same poems; they will need to perform new poems.
- Closing date: Friday 8 October at 5pm
- If you submit for other Poetry Africa 2021 competitions you need to submit different video’s for each competition
Submit your work by clicking the button below filling in the Google form