Winners and judges out of their money as £20,000 writing awards appear to have closed | Prizes and prizes

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

Established in 2022, the Plaza Awards last year presented 10 awards judged by “the world’s best poets and writers.”

However, some judges in the 2025 competition say they have not been paid, and a number of winners say their entries were withdrawn after they were accused of using artificial intelligence to create their works, allegations they strongly deny.

One of the judges, Damon Galgut, the 2021 Booker Prize winner, described the competition as a “scam” after he was not paid for his work judging a fictional section of the annual competition.

Anthony Joseph, winner of the TS Eliot Poetry Prize 2022, says he is not paid for his work.

The awards were founded by Simon Kerr, a writer who previously worked at the University of Hull and ran another writing award which led to a complaint about late payment.

Galgut, who won the Booker Prize for his novel The Promise, said he was promised £1,500 to judge a fiction competition last year, and agreed because he believes such competitions help emerging writers develop. His report and the selected winners were later published online.

When he and his agent tried to contact Kerr to obtain payment, there was no response. Kerr eventually responded to say that Galgut had not invoiced him properly and committed to paying him within 60 days. “Apparently, in your rarefied world, it was up to me to somehow snatch these elusive payment details from the platonic ether,” he said in an email to Galgut.

Galgut denied Kerr’s claims and told him that he “disappeared without a trace the moment the payment was mentioned.” Keir then demanded that Galgut withdraw the payment request, threatened to sue him for defamation and harassment, and said that the author was “not a reasonable actor”.

Joseph said he judged the Audio Poetry Prize, sent the results of his work and sent an invoice to Kerr in September for £1,250, but there was no response. Then take the case to small claims court.

Kerr responded to the claim, saying the work was late, vague and incomplete. that Joseph sent “coercive and threatening emails”; And it caused damage to the reputation of the award. Joseph said work was delayed due to a car accident he was involved in, and said allegations about the tone of his emails were exaggerated.

Audio Poetry Prize winner, Peter Dolan, was told his entry was disqualified because it had been “flagged by AI content”. [detectors]“Although we cannot know for certain how much (if any) AI was involved in the production of this piece, the Plaza Awards have a zero-tolerance policy on the use of generative AI,” an email told him.

Dolan told Kerr that Amnesty International’s claim was “complete nonsense” and that his poem was originally published in 2018.

Another award winner, who requested to remain anonymous, said he was disqualified for the same reason and received a similar email. They “vehemently deny” any use of AI, and say they are unable to use the technology. Both writers said they were not given the opportunity to prove the originality of their work.

According to the awards website – which was inaccessible this week – Kerr received grants from the Society of Authors and the Royal Society of Literature that helped save his home from repossession after he lost his job during the pandemic.

He said on the website that he invested the capital from the subsequent sale of the house into Plaza Awards.

“I was so grateful to the book community for saving me from homelessness, destitution, and possibly suicide. (It also gave me a mission at a time in life — I’m 53 — when a man needs a mission to stay halfway sane in a crazy world),” he said.

The awards ceremony, which was scheduled to be held in Dordogne, France, last October, was cancelled. The site said this was due to a millionaire fantasy writer withdrawing his support due to the quality of entries submitted for one of the awards. The associated short story writing course was also canceled 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 has an address in Islington, north London, did not respond to inquiries from the Guardian about the Plaza awards.