Aiming to celebrate and develop life writing in the UK the Spread the Word Life Writing Prize is offering writers over the age of eighteen years living in the UK the opportunity to gain monetary and development prizes. The Prize is being run in association with Goldsmiths Writers’ Centre and a generous donation from Joanna Mungo. The winner will receive £1,500, an Arvon course and two years’ membership of the Royal Society of Literature. Two highly commended writers will each gain £500 and a writing mentor. All winners will receive development meetings with Robert Caskie of Caskie Literary Agency and an editor at Unbound Publishers. Judges are literary editor Erica Wagner, poetry editor Hannah Lowe and Unbound Publishing commissioning editor Kwaku Osei-Afrifa.
The competition is open to writers who have not previously published a full-length fiction or non-fiction work of over 30,000 words, had a theatre script, screen or radio play professionally produced nor twenty or more poems published individually or in a collection. Submit up to 5,000 words of an extract or self-contained piece of unpublished life writing, defined as ‘intending to be true’ and should be based on your own personal experience, not that of someone else.
The deadline is 9 February. Entries can be made online or by post after downloading an entry form from the website: www.spreadtheword.org.uk/projects/life-writing-prize/