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- 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some of the judges for the 2025 competition say they were not paid, and a number of winners say they had their entries withdrawn after being accused of using AI to create their work – allegations they strenuously denied.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.
The Plaza Prizes awards ceremony has now been delayed. Photograph: Screengrab
The winner of the audio poetry prize, Peter Doolan, was told that his entry was disqualified as it was “flagged by AI content [detectors]”. An email told him: “While we cannot know with certainty the extent (if any) of AI involvement in the generation of this piece, The Plaza Prizes has a zero-tolerance policy for the use of generative AI.”
Doolan told Kerr that the AI allegation was “absolutely nonsense” and that his poem had originally been published in 2018.
Another award winner, who asked to remain anonymous, said they had been disqualified for the same reason and received an identical email. They “vigorously deny” any use of AI and said they were unable to use the technology. Both writers said they were not given an opportunity to prove the originality of their work.
According to the website of the prizes – which was this week inaccessible – Kerr received grants from the Society of Authors and the Royal Society of Literature that helped save his house from repossession after he lost his job during the pandemic.
On the website, he said he had put the capital from the subsequent house sale into the Plaza Prizes.
“I was very grateful to the community of writers for saving me from homelessness, destitution and, likely, suicide. (It also gave me a mission at a time in life – 53 years old – when a man needs a mission to stay halfway sane in a mad world),” he said.
A planned awards ceremony due to take place in the Dordogne in France last October was cancelled. The website said this was because a millionaire fantasy writer had withdrawn their support because of the quality of entries submitted for one of the awards. A linked short story writing course was also cancelled after a lack of donations. Kerr made an appeal for help with funding after struggling to raise money to publish a planned anthology.
In 2014, the Guardian reported that a writing competition run by Kerr had not paid a prize to one of the winners and that the awards ceremony had been cancelled. The money was paid shortly after the Guardian contacted the University of Hull, where he was working at the time.
Kerr – whose website gave an address of Islington, north London – did not respond to queries from the Guardian on the Plaza Prizes.
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