ENTRIES are open for the Australian Catholic University Prize for Poetry, with winnings totalling $10,000.

After the success of the ACU Prize for Literature launched in 2013, the 2015 ACU Prize for Poetry will be awarded for outstanding poetry with the theme, ‘Peace, Tolerance and Understanding’. Father Anthony Casamento, Director of the university’s Identity and Mission directorate, which will be sponsoring the prize, said the previous success of the prize demonstrated the strength of poetry in Australia and the desire to write to a theme that was both topical and meaningful.

Poet, author and academic, Professor Kevin Hart, whose latest anthology is “Morning Knowledge”, will lead the judging panel. Professor Hart holds the Edwin B. Kyle Chair of Christian Studies in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia and the Eric D’Arcy Chair of Philosophy, and is Director of the Centre for Philosophy and Phenomenology of Religion at ACU.

He said the prize was rapidly becoming the pre-eminent prize for Poetry in Australia and described this year’s theme timely “given the level of intolerance and indifference to understanding others that exists in our world today, and underscores the Catholic Church’s long standing tradition of raising awareness of acceptance of all.”

Entered poems must be unpublished (including on any website or blog), must not have won any other competition, and must not be under consideration by any publisher, literary journal or for any other prize.

Winners will be announced on August 26 as part of the Melbourne Writers Festival.

Entries to aculiterature@acu.edu.au close soon, on Tuesday June 16. All details at acu.edu.au