Updates On “Transfer”
(Film About Whites Paying
To Have Their Souls Deposited
Into Black Bodies)
A German film I initially profiled back in September 2010, when it was selected for Fantastic Fest 2010. It’s since screened at a number of film festivals across the globe, and, as I learned over the weekend, officially opened in theaters in Germany on September 22nd, just last week Thursday, although I was under the impression that it had already played there.
Titled Transfer, German filmmaker Damir Lukacevic is its director. The film now has an official poster, which you’ll find below, new still images, and an interesting fact about its casting worth sharing.
First, here’s the breakdown:
At the Menzana facility, customers with the financial means to do so can sidestep the constraints of this mortal coil by having their consciousness and memories implanted into the minds of young, healthy bodies, primarily those of immigrant Africans and other third world residents who agree to participate in the procedure for the money their families will receive. The film opens with a consultation session for potential clients Herman and Anna (Hans Michael Rehberg and Ingrid Andree), a wealthy German couple entering their twilight years. While both have ethical concerns about the procedure, Herman is deeply worried by his wife’s failing health and both fear the day that death will separate them. Their initial hesitation to the transfer procedure gives way after Anna learns that she has but months to live. She and Herman soon return to Menzana and commit to purchasing the bodies of Apolain and Sarah (B.J. Britt and Regine Nehy), two refugees from Africa who have been specially selected for their compatibility with the body and brain chemistry of the aging couple. Under the conditions of the transfer, Herman and Anna have use of their new bodies for 20 hours a day. When they sleep, their hosts Apolain and Sarah return to consciousness and are able to use their own bodies for a period of four hours.
As I said in my initial post last year, the ideas here simultaneously intrigue, as well as concern me, having not seen the film!
On one hand, it may provide for an intriguing opportunity to explore race, privilege, class, identity, ethics, the nature of being/consciousness and more, on film, and maybe in ways that we haven’t quite seen before; on the other, it could be nothing more than an exploitative (even though well-intended) piece of trash fiction… an experiment gone completely wrong.
But, again, I haven’t seen it, so I have no idea on what side of the fence it stands. I’m, at the very least, curious to see it for myself.
The film now has an official poster, which you’ll find below, as well as a new still image.
Also, interesting bit regarding its casting… I learned over the weekend that its 2 black leads are American actors! Their faces weren’t familiar to me from the stills and the trailer, but I only realized this because I looked at the IMDB pages (why I didn’t do it before, I don’t know).
B.J. Britt and Regine Nehy are their names.
B.J.‘s resume includes roles on Lincoln Heights, Everybody Hates Chris, and One Tree Hill; Regine’s resume includes roles also in Lincoln Heights, Lakeview Terrace (the Kerry Washington, Samuel L Jackson film produced by Will Smith), Death At A Funeral (Chris Rock’s American remake)
Rest assured, we’ll be getting in touch with them to find out more about this film, how they got involved, and more.
If we have any readers in Germany, and you’ve seen the film, now that it’s opened theatrically in that country, I’d love to hear your thoughts on the film; or if anyone has any further info, feel free to drop me an email.
I’ve reached out to the production and distribution companies for news on future screenings, and international distribution. Once I get a response, I’ll share here.
Here’s the poster (trailer underneath):
Here’s the trailer again:
The Post-Black Condition
Arem DuplessisBy ORLANDO PATTERSON
Published: September 22, 2011
Much has been written on the benefits that accrued to the generation of African-Americans reaping the rewards of the civil rights revolution. But we have heard surprisingly little from those in the post-civil-rights age about what these benefits have meant to them, and especially how they view themselves as black people in an America now led by a black president. In his new book, Touré’s aim is to provide an account of this “post-black” condition, one that emerged only in the 1980s but by the ’90s had become the “new black.”
WHO’S AFRAID OF POST-BLACKNESS?
What It Means to Be Black Now
By Touré
Illustrated. 251 pp. Free Press. $25.
Listen to interview with Touré
Touré / Jonathan Mannion
Post-blackness entails a different perspective from earlier generations’, one that takes for granted what they fought for: equal rights, integration, middle-class status, affirmative action and political power. While rooted in blackness, it is not restricted by it, as Michael Eric Dyson says in the book’s foreword; it is an enormously complex and malleable state, Touré says, “a completely liquid shape-shifter that can take any form.” With so many ways of performing blackness, there is now no consensus about what it is or should be. One of his goals, Touré writes in “Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness? What It Means to Be Black Now,” is “to attack and destroy the idea that there is a correct or legitimate way of doing blackness.” Post-blackness has no patience with “self-appointed identity cops” and their “cultural bullying.”
What this malleability means, according to nearly all the 105 prominent African-Americans interviewed for this book, is a liberating pursuit of individuality. Black artists, like other professionals, now feel free to pursue any interest they like and are no longer burdened with the requirement to represent “the race.” Indeed, when they do explore black themes, as most still do, they feel at liberty to be irreverent and humorous. Thus Kara Walker, a typical post-black artist, unhesitatingly “mines modern visions of slavery for comedy without disrespecting slaves.” There are no sacred cows, not even the great civil rights leaders. The artist Rashid Johnson is typically candid in a way many older African-Americans are bound to find hurtful and ungrateful. According to Touré, some of Johnson’s work says, “These people are our history, so honor them, but also, these people are history, so let’s move on.” Ouch!
Post-blackness also means an expanding of collective identity “into infinity.” This involves a radically new intercultural fluency, partly exemplified in hip-hop but also in the new hybrid genres challenging its hegemony. For every Eminem there is a post-black Santigold, who counts the Pixies and punk rock among her strongest influences. Oddly, there is no mention of the retro-futuristic singer Janelle Monáe, whose portrayal of an android as the Other — pamphlets listing Monáe’s “Ten Droid Commandments” for individuality have been handed out at her concerts — has to be the ultimate in post-blackness.
Such fluency undergirds complete ease in interethnic relations. Touré, himself married to a Lebanese-American, praises the effortless “mode-switching” of celebrities and leaders like Oprah Winfrey and President Obama: “Blackness is an important part of them but does not necessarily dominate their persona.” This allows them not only to trust and be trusted by European-Americans, but to seamlessly display the many forms of blackness when the occasion demands.
This all sounds idyllic, but there are problems. To his credit, Touré — a correspondent for MSNBC, a contributing editor at Rolling Stone and the author of three previous books — devotes nearly half of “Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness?” squarely, if not always successfully, to confronting them. If blackness has become so infinite and malleable a thing, wherein does it exist? Touré insists that there is a “core” there and that “who I am is indelibly shaped by blackness.” Nonetheless, many blacks, including members of his own generation, may wonder if there is anything left, as Touré discovered one terrible night in college. During his freshman year at Emory, he had hung out mostly with white friends, but soon enough was spending “all my social time with black students.” Later on, after a party at the black dorm, a large black man from Alabama barked at him: “Shut up, Touré! You ain’t black!” Devastated, Touré spent the rest of the night in the soul-searching that eventually led to the present book.
Helping him to understand, in the words of Henry Louis Gates Jr. (an interviewee), the core beneath the “multiplicity of multiplicities” of ways to express blackness were the many successful people he spoke to. Post-black identity, we learn, resides in the need to live with and transcend new and subtle but pervasive forms of racism: “Post-black does not mean ‘post-racial.’ ” This new racism is invisible and unknowable, always lurking in the shadows, the secret decisions of whites resulting in lost opportunities blacks never knew about or even thought possible: “There’s a sense of malevolent ghosts darting around you, screwing with you, often out of sight but never out of mind.” Even so extraordinarily successful a person as Elizabeth Alexander, the tenured Yale professor and inaugural poet, claims to be haunted by “a continual underestimation of my intellectual ability and capacity, and the real insidious aspect of that kind of racism is that we don’t know half the time when people are underestimating us.” Touré, though he doesn’t call it that, seems to have unearthed here a new post-black sociological evil: counterfactual racism.
Less metaphysical accounts of what constitutes post-black identity turn out to be nothing more than the shared experience of living with, and overcoming, lingering old-fashioned racism, of learning to ignore the white gaze, along with the added burden of disregarding the censoring black one. This sounds remarkably like a black version of what Alan Dershowitz calls “the Tsuris Theory of Jewish Survival,” in which assimilated American Jews desperately need external troubles and imagined enemies to maintain their identity.
Touré is at his best in his finely delineated observations of the joys and dangers of post-blackness, whether it is being lived or being staged. He offers a wickedly funny account of a performance piece by the artist William Pope.L, some of whose “best-known projects are his crawls, where he dons a business suit and crawls on hands and knees through miles of Manhattan.” During one such performance, in Tompkins Square Park, an older black man accosts a white man who is videotaping Pope.L, thinking that the videographer is humiliating a homeless brother. “What are you doing showing black people like this?” Pope.L tries to explain: “I’m working. . . . I create symbolic acts.” There is generational bewilderment: “What is a symbolic act? Crawling up to the white man, or what?!”
Touré fully assays the “complex and messy and fluid” possibilities and dangers inherent in post-blackness in a dazzling deconstruction of the tragicomic art and life of Dave Chappelle. Utterly uninhibited by black or white gazes, Chappelle irreverently cast a sharply revealing light on black life that drew a multiracial audience of millions to his Comedy Central routines. But did he go too far in his comic mining of traditional black postures and vulnerabilities? Touré suggests that, in the end, Chappelle came close to both prostituting and pimping the black life he had once so endearingly parodied, and that in a terrible moment of self-recognition he realized that his “comic mouth has written checks that his body is afraid to cash. . . . The freedom of the post-black era has scared him to death. So he picks up the gauntlet he threw down at the beginning of the show and he runs,” ditching a $50 million contract for the anonymity of Africa.
For all its occasional contradictions (why the put-down of the comedian Byron Allen for his Middle American cultural fluency?) and omissions (there is no consideration of the ways immigrant blacks and mixed-race people are contributing to post-black heterogeneity), this is one of the most acutely observed accounts of what it is like to be young, black and middle-class in contemporary America. Touré inventively draws on a range of evidence — autobiography, music, art, interviews, comedy and popular social analysis — for a performance carried through with unsparing honesty, in a distinctive voice that is often humorous, occasionally wary and defensive, but always intensely engaging.
<p>The Harvest/La Cosecha - Promotional Trailer from Shine Global on Vimeo.</p>
THE HARVEST/LA COSEHCA tells the story of the children who feed America. There are an estimated 400,000 children in the US who labor in the fields to feed us. They lack the protections provided by the Fair Labor Standards Act that children working in other industries have.
The film follows 3 of them as they follow the 2009-10 harvest and struggle to help their families survive.>via: http://vimeo.com/16968153
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The Harvest/La Cosecha
The Story of the Children Who Feed America.
Learn More
Listen to Zulema’s story, age 11 Eva Longoria talks about THE HARVEST and Shine Global >> Meet Robin >>
Meet Rory >>
View the Trailer >>
Some Facts On Child Farmworkers >>
THE HARVEST/LA COSECHA is the story of the children who work as many as 12 hours a day, six months a year in the scorching hot sun, without the protection of child labor laws. These children are not toiling in the fields in some far away land. They are working here, in our back yard, in America.
Not since the work of Walker Evans, has the world of these agricultural workers been so vividly and intimately depicted. More than 400,000 migrant child workers in the US journey from their homes traveling from state to state, farm to farm, crop to crop, picking the produce we all eat. Many of these children are American citizens. All are working to help their families survive while sacrificing the birthright of childhood: play; stability; school. The film profiles three of them as they work through the 2009 harvest. Whose families will be “lucky” enough to get work? Which families will be separated? Which will be deported or injured or killed? Will any manage to keep their dreams alive?
Set to premier in the Spring of 2011, THE HARVEST/LA COSECHA follows three children:
Zulema Lopez, 12, thinks of nothing but working in the fields, and one of her earliest childhood memories is of her mother teaching her how to pick and clean strawberries. Having attended 8 schools in the last 8 years, she struggles to keep up and is afraid she may not make it to high school. When asked what her dreams are, she replies that she doesn’t have time for them.
Perla Sanchez, 14, travels with her large family to pick crops across the United States. The only benefit for Perla of continuing to migrate on the harvest with her family is that it will insulate her from the other perils inherent in being a teenage Latina with limited resources. If she stays in Texas, she is unsure if she will be able to resist the lure of gang life. She dreams of becoming a lawyer so that she can help other migrant workers who struggle to make ends meet.
Victor Huapilla is a 16 year-old living in Florida. His family migrated to the US when he was young looking for a better life and is on the path to full citizenship. To help support his family, Victor has had to balance his time between harvesting and going to school and his education suffers. While Victor is often in the fields, he’s glad his younger sisters are still spared the ordeal of picking up to 1500 pounds of tomatoes a day. But the expenses of legally bringing his two older sisters to America bankrupts the family and they can’t afford to migrate for work. Will they be able to keep the family together?
THE HARVEST/LA COSECHA was shot in high definition video. Principal photography began in Minnesota and North Dakota in June 2007, and continued in Northern California, Texas, Michigan, Ohio, and Florida through the 2010 harvest. Post-production began in Fall 2010, with the anticipated completion of the film by March 2011. Shot with cinematic scope, revealing the drama and impact of narrative character-based storytelling and powered by the children’s determination to find hope within their hardship, THE HARVEST boasts unparalleled access to life on these farms across the nation and gives us the opportunity to connect with these children who live these unthinkable lives to feed us, and more importantly to them, to feed their families and themselves.
Facts about the children who feed America
More than 400,000 children work in American fields to harvest the food we all eat
Children working in agriculture endure lives of extreme poverty
Children who work as farm laborers do not have access to proper education
Children face health hazards and fatalities in the fields
WHAT’S BEING DONE:
For information on the CARE Act and the current legislative work being done on this issue please visit www.theharvestfilm.com
Also follow us on Twitter: @theharvestdoc
And on Facebook: The Harvest/La Cosecha
TO LEARN MORE VISIT THESE SITES…
Information gathered from afop.org, stopchildlabor.org, and Human Rights Watch.
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COURTESY PHOTO
Just another day at the office for Zulema López, 12.
PUBLISHED: SEPTEMBER 21, 2011
“In some countries, children work 14 hours a day, 7 days a week,” the opening title cards in The Harvest/La Cosecha read. “Children 12 and younger pick crops. The United States of America is one of those countries.”
It is easy to dismiss this documentary produced by non-profit Shine Global and executive-produced by Eva Longoria as a liberal infomercial with political goals (at the end of the movie there is a link and a number you can text to donate to other non-profits that will “help change lives of child migrant workers”). It is more difficult to deny the fact that these children — these American children — are migrant farm workers who live here and spend their lives working like asses for peanuts and are unable to finish school due to the constant moving.
Are the parents or the government to blame? Is capitalism the culprit? The documentary doesn’t address these questions, focusing instead on simply exposing how these kids live and making you think twice before you condemn some Asian country for its child labor laws. You don’t need to look that far; it is happening right here.
The movie is a disturbing eye-opener that offers no solutions. And even if it could have made its point in less than 84 minutes, it is effective in the way that it enters these families’ lives — at times making you feel as if you are right there, living with them. The narrative follows 12-year-old Zulema López, of El Cenizo, 16-year-old Víctor Huapilla, of Quincy, Fla., and 14-year-old Perla Sánchez, of Weslaco, all of whom started picking crops with their families before reaching their teens. They move from town to town, waking at 5 in the morning and working all day in 100-degree heat. López, for example, makes $64 a week; on a slow day, Huapilla carries 1,500 pounds of tomatoes (each 25-pound bucket pays $1). The average farm working family in America makes less than $17,500 a year.
The Harvest is a depressing, no-way-out look at life in America, and it isn’t easy to watch. Perhaps the only somewhat uplifting moment comes during the closing credits, when the filmmakers added biographies of former child laborers who went on to successful professional careers (like NASA astronaut Jose Hernandez, who worked the fields from ages 7 to 16). But go tell that to a kid who has to get up at 5 a.m. to pick vegetables.
“I think I’m helping [mom] with [this],” says López. “But dreams? No, I’m still working on those.” •
>via: http://sacurrent.com/screens/film/disturbing-harvest-focuses-on-child-labor-i...
Remembering Wangari Maathai
Visionary, human rights advocate, womanist, mother, Kenyan activist Wangari Maathai has passed away at 71. Maathai lost her battle with cancer after being in hospital for a week, reports the New York Times.
As we mourn the loss of such an important African heroine, we remember five quotes she left behind as seeds for change:
“My heart is in the land and women I came from.”
“African women in general need to know that it’s okay for them to be the way they are – to see the way they are as a strength, and to be liberated from fear and from silence.”
“We can work together for a better world with men and women of goodwill, those who radiate the intrinsic goodness of humankind.” “All of us have a God in us, and that God is the spirit that unites all life, everything that is on this planet. It must be this voice that is telling me to do something, and I am sure it’s the same voice that is speaking to everybody on this planet – at least everybody who seems to be concerned about the fate of the world, the fate of this planet.”
“Today we are faced with a challenge that calls for a shift in our thinking, so that humanity stops threatening its life-support system. We are called to assist the Earth to heal her wounds and in the process heal our own.”
Read this amazing tribute to Maathai by Kenyan poet Mburu Kamau.
Rest in peace.
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We’ve written about her twice on S&A, so some may be familiar already. In 2004, she becamethe first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize; Kenyan political and environmental activist Wangari Maathai has died at age 71, losing a lengthy battle with cancer.
First, the report on her death this morning:
Second, in March, we alerted you to a documentary on Maathai, titled Taking Root: The Vision of Wangari Maathai, which documents the story of Kenya’s Green Belt Movement, a grassroots organization encouraging rural women and families to plant trees in community groups, and centers Maathai, the movement’s founder, as she helps spark a movement to reclaim Kenya’s land from a century of deforestation, while providing new sources of livelihood to rural communities.
The film follows her three-decade journey of courage to protect the environment, ensure gender equality, defend human rights and promote democracy - all sprouting from the achievable act of planting trees.
Lisa Merton and Alan Dater directed the production which aired on March 22 on the PBSnetwork Independent Lens series.
It’s now on DVD and can be purchased via the film’s website HERE.
Here’s a preview:
<p style="font-size:11px; font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; color: #808080; margin-top: 5px; background: transparent; text-align: center; width: 550px;">Watch the full episode. See more Independent Lens.</p>
Watch the full episode. See more Independent Lens.
And lastly, back in January 2010, CNN profiled Wangari Maathai; embedded in 3 parts below:
Part 1:
Part 2:
Part 3:
If you didn’t know, now you know…
RIP.
>via: http://blogs.indiewire.com/shadowandact/archives/wangari_maathai_first_africa...
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Photo: Wanjira Mathai/greenbeltmovement.org
“The planting of trees is the planting of ideas. By starting with the simple step of digging a hole and planting a tree, we plant hope for ourselves and for future generations.”
Those were the words of Wangari Maathai. An ardent environmentalist and social activist, Maathai had long been a hero to many in her native Kenya. In 1977, she founded the Green Belt Movement, which uses community-based tree planting as the entry point for organizing to fight poverty and boost civic engagement. Its projects range from food security initiatives to citizen education trainings and raising HIV/AIDS awareness through theater.
In 2004, Wangari became the first African woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. In addition to her work at the grassroots level, she also authored several books and accessed the political avenue to forward her efforts, garnering international attention and support. Her passion for uplifting her fellow Kenyans is an inspiration that goes beyond borders, and her organization’s expansion to GBM International signals the spread of environmental activism and awareness. In a region where the green movement is so clearly indivisible from poor people’s struggle for justice, Wangari was truly a visionary leader.
After a lifetime dedicated to the fight for a healthier and more sustainable world, she passed away yesterday at age 71 from cancer. Over 30 million trees have been planted through GBM over the years, a testament to her life’s work. “To me they represent life, and they represent hope,” Maathai once said. “I think it is the green color. I tell people, I think heaven is green.”
Members of the Green Belt Movement plant trees on an eroding hillside in Kenya. Photo by Mia MacDonald
Food security.
GBM tree nursery. Photo by Cassandra Pataky
| Music Video
Lowkey ft Logic – “Relatives”
Moments ago, UK emcee Lowkey released the official video for the track “Relatives”, featuring long time collaborator and People’s Army capo Logic.
The visuals for the track, despite it originally featuring on Lowkey‘s debut album Dear Listener back in 2009, has dropped on the eve of the 10th anniversary of 9/11 and shows the story of Logic and Lowkey going line for line telling the story of an Iraqi boy enlist in the Mujahedeen (voiced by Logic) and a British boy who becomes a member of the army (voiced by Lowkey). As the track and video progresses, the lives of the two are drawn together with a harrowing ending and a thought provoking message.
Watch the visuals below.
“pain is the same fam/it’s all relative..”
Lowkey‘s new album Soundtrack To The Struggle is out on the 16th October but available to pre-order now.
Logic‘s army Freeman is out now – click for the full stream and purchase.
September 4, 2011
by Michelle
Rapper Lowkey has dropped another video from his forthcoming album Soundtrack To The Struggle for the track entitled “Obama Nation Pt 2″ featuring M1 Of Dead Prez, UK MC Black The Ripper with additional bars from Lupe Fiasco‘s “Words I Never Said”.
These dynamic and clever visuals directed by Global Faction displays the three emcees critical views about president Obama’s policies of war including footage of controversial American conservative radio host Glenn Beck‘rapping along’ to Lowkey’s lyrics.
Check the video below.
Soundtrack To The Struggle is due for release on October 16th 2011, but you can pre order your copy here.
>via: http://www.soulculture.co.uk/blogs/lowkey-ft-m1-of-dead-prez-x-black-the-ripp...
I am Palestine - The Film
Mslexia news
MSLEXIA 2011
WOMEN'S NOVEL COMPETITION
1st Prize: £5,000
Judging Panel:
Clare Alexander, literary agent
Jenni Murray, broadcaster
Sarah Waters, novelistThe competition is open to unpublished women novelists writing in any genre for adults, including literary fiction, women’s fiction, young adult fiction, science fiction, fantasy, chick-lit, crime fiction, thriller, historical fiction... but not nonfiction or fiction for under 13s. To constitute a novel, your book must total at least 50,000 words.
Closing date: 30 September
Entry fee: £25
Send up to 5,000 words – which must be the first 5,000 words of your novel. Please make sure you have finished the novel before you send your entry.
Please note: This is NOT an annual competition. The next novel competition is planned for 2014.
WORKSHOPS FOR NOVELISTS
Quick Fix Fiction: Struggling with last minute tweaks to your novel manuscript? Need some tips for polishing your entry? Read our feature Quick Fix Fiction, first published in issue 49, in which top manuscript editor Rose Gaete details six last-minute fixes to try with your finished manuscript before sending it out into the world. Read more >>
Visit our Get Published section for a series of intensive workshops to help you with your novel, originally toured with the From Laptop to Bookshop Mslexia roadshow. Find out all about the perfect first paragraph, as well as how to choose a title, compose a pitch letter and write a synopsis in a series of free pdf downloads – and there is also a series of interviews with agents and authors who reveal their secrets and offer up advice to the budding novelist. Perfect if you're honing your entry for the Mslexia women's novel competition! Read more >>
Who is the competition aimed at?
"It doesn't have to be the truth, just your vision of it, written down." Virginia Woolf
- Women with an unfinished manuscript languishing in a bottom drawer. (Could this be the impetus you need to finish it?)
- Women who took up the write-a-novel-in-a-month challenge with NaNoWriMo and have a rough first draft. (Why not polish it up and send it to Mslexia?)
- Women who’ve submitted their completed novels over and over, and have despaired of finding an agent. (If you reach our shortlist, they’ll all sit up and take notice.)
- Women who’ve always wanted to write a novel, but could never find the time.
Get your book noticed
Because publishers specialise in different genres, we cannot guarantee a publishing contract at this stage. But we can guarantee that agents and editors will be falling over themselves for a first read of the winning manuscript.
What editors and agents are saying:
'When you find a great winner you can be sure publishers will come knocking. I will be first in line, wanting to read whoever wins’
Lennie Goodings, Virago Press‘It’s exciting to welcome a new prize that shines a light on talented unpublished women writers – I’d love to have first read of the winning novel’
Judith Murray, Greene and Heaton Literary Agency‘How wonderful to hear about this new platform for talented women writers. I’m really keen to read the winning manuscripts’
Alexandra Pringle, Bloomsbury Publishing‘If a new writer wins a competition it immediately grabs my attention. I am a big fan of Mslexia and will definitely look at the prizewinning entries’
Madeleine Buston, Darley Anderson Literary, TV and Film Agency‘I’m committed to discovering new women’s voices, so this is great news. I know there are many talented writers out there waiting to be discovered’
Sarah Savitt, Faber and Faber
Novel Competition
Have you got a corking novel stuffed away in a drawer somewhere? Perhaps you're on the verge of completing a masterpiece but don't know what to do with it? If so, why not send it in to our competition? As long as you've never had any novel published before, we promise to take a look.
We're looking for fiction that has a twist to it which is also original, humorous, surprising, action-packed, quirky, romantic, moving or thought-provoking. Unfortunately, we won't consider work that can be categorised as horror, crime, children's fiction, non-fiction or science-fiction.
If you think your novel fits our specifications, send in the first three chapters. If we like it, we may ask to see the rest. If you win, there's a cash prize and we might even publish your book.
Rules and Submission Guidelines
1. The novel must be approximately 60,000 and 100,000 words in total (although work outside this range will be considered on merit) and should be the original work of the author. The novel should be written in English.
2. The novel should not have been published anywhere before, in the UK or other parts of the world, either in part or as a whole, on the internet or on paper, nor should it have won a place in any other competition.
3. The author must be a first-time novelist. That is to say, they must not have had any novel, including this entry, published anywhere - on the internet or on paper or in another country - under any name. However, it is acceptable to have had other kinds of writing published such as, poetry, short stories or prose.
4. The closing date for the competition is midnight on 30th September 2011. Entries received after this will automatically be disqualified.
5. The fee is £8 per entry. Contestants may submit a maximum of three entries in this competition.
6. Entry is online. Only the first three chapters of your novel should be submitted online, attached as a Word document. The author's name must not appear on the document. (See the submissions page for full details.)
7. After the closing date, a shortlist of finalists will be drawn up and these contestants contacted and asked to submit their complete novel online to Beak Books.
8. From this shortlist, three winners will be selected with the following prizes awarded - 1st prize, £80, 2nd prize, £60, 3rd prize, £40. We realise that this is not a huge amount of money but because this is our first competition and we do not know how many entries we will receive, we need to be cautious about how much to offer.
9. The winner of the first prize may also be offered publication in 2012. However, in the very unlikely event that the standard is not deemed suitable, Beak Books reserves the right to refuse publication. This would not affect the awarding of prize money. But as we say, it's extremely unlikely that this will be the case. We know there are plenty of brilliant writers out there who are looking for their lucky break!
10. The judges' decision is final. No correspondence concerning the outcome of the competition will be entered into.
*Tips*
* Before you submit, are you sure your novel fits what we're looking for? (Have another look at the guidelines at the top of the page if you're not sure.)
* It might seem obvious, but have you double-checked your work for spelling mistakes and grammatical errors?
* Should you win first prize and a publishing contract, would you use your own name or a pseudonym? It might be worth thinking of an alias now, just in case.
Ready to enter? Go to submissions page.
Jerry Jazz Musician
New Short Fiction Contest
"Tres Marias," by Stephen Henriques
"The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike."- Ralph Ellison
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Three times a year, Jerry Jazz Musician awards a writer who submits, in our opinion, the best original, previously unpublished work of approximately one - five thousand words. The winner will be announced via a special mailing of our Jerry Jazz Musician newsletter. Publishers, artists, musicians and interested readers are among those who subscribe to the newsletter. Additionally, the work will be published on the home page of Jerry Jazz Musician and featured there for at least four weeks.
The Jerry Jazz Musician reader has interests in music, social history, literature, politics, art, film and theatre, particularly that of the counter-culture of mid-twentieth century America. Your writing should appeal to a reader with these characteristics.
Contest details
A prize of $100 will be awarded for the winning story. In addition to the story being published on Jerry Jazz Musician, the author's acceptance of the prize money gives Jerry Jazz Musician the right to include the story in an anthology that will appear in book or magazine form. No entry fee is required. One story entry only.
Submission deadline for the next contest is September 30, 2011. Publishing date will be on or about November 1, 2011.
Please submit your story by September 30, 2011 via Word or Adobe attachment to jm@jerryjazz.com, and be sure to include your name, address and phone number with your submission. Please include "Short Fiction Contest Submission" in the subject heading of the email.
Good luck!
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