Are you a talented wordsmith? Or do you have a gift for taking a showstopping photograph?

Entries for the 2023 Shepton Snowdrops Festival Photography and Poetry Competitions open on September 24. Organisers are hoping to attract plenty of local entries, as well as from around the globe. This year (2022) almost 800 poets and photographers were inspired to enter from as far afield as Australia, Serbia, India and Singapore as well as many European countries and the UK.

The Poetry Competition was singled out by Reedsy and recommended as one of the Best Writing Contests of 2022.The theme for 2023 is 'Let Nature Thrive' - recognition of the challenges faced by plants and nature in the light of extreme weather and other global environmental challenges.

Award-winning photographer, Jason Ingram, will judge the Photography Competition. For the last three years (2019-2021) he has won the prestigious Gordon Rae Photographer of the Year Award from the Garden Media Guild. Jason also works with international garden designers on private commissions. In 2019 he provided over 300 exceptional photographs of the Piet Oudolf designed gardens at the Hauser and Wirth Art Gallery in Somerset for a book, Planting the Oudolf Gardens at Hauser and Wirth Somerset.

Jason is looking forward to some creative interpretations of the 'Let Nature Thrive' theme: "Nature surrounds us all in some shape and form every day so this brief is as wide as you can interpret it. When you really start to look you see elements of nature thriving the moment you walk out of the door. Whether you live in a city, town or the countryside, we are surrounded by it."

The poems will be judged by poet and author Wendy Pratt. She founded and edits Spelt, a magazine of poetry and creative non-fiction and she recently set up the Spelt Nature Writing School. Wendy has won or been placed in many competitions, and her work is widely published in magazines and anthologies. She's written three full collections of poetry and two pamphlets.

Her latest collection, When I Think of My Body as a Horse, won the Poetry Business book and pamphlet award in 2020. Wendy said: "I'll be looking forward to reading poems in which nature is found in unusual places, or perspectives are changed and challenged on what is and isn't beautiful. We are trained to divide plants and animals into 'good' and 'bad' but there really isn't a difference, there are no weeds, only plants that are deemed to be in the wrong place . It's much easier to love a beautiful bird than a slithering slug, but all nature is interconnected, everything has its role and its job and all is beautiful in its own way. "

The competitions will be open for entries from September 24 2022. For more details about how to enter visit the website.