Offered by the press, periodicals, and the National Broadcasting Service. These are for unpublished work, and vary greatly in the value of the prize money and the quality of the entries attracted.

Among awards worth recording are:

The Landfall Awards. In 1953 the literary quarterly Landfall offered four poetry awards of £25 each; the winners were M. K. Joseph and Keith Sinclair. In 1956 two prose awards of £25 were offered for fiction and non-fiction. John Caselberg and Maurice Shadbolt were the winners, both with short stories.

The Otago Daily Times in 1961 sponsored a novel competition to mark its hundredth year of publication. First prize of £350 went to Errol Brathwaite for An Affair of Men.

Small prizes are offered by various of the “Little Magazines”, including Te Ao Hou, which endeavours to encourage good writing both in English and Maori.

The New Zealand Listener in association with the National Broadcasting Service has held occasional literary competitions. In 1936 W. Graeme Holder won a prize for a radio play. In 1946 John Gundry won both sections of a radio-play competition for prizes totalling £100. In 1949, to mark the proposed royal visit of King George VI, the Listener offered a £50 prize for an ode which should be “an expression of New Zealand's homage to the Crown”. The winner was Ruth France.