The Paris Literary Prize is an international novella competition for unpublished writers. Any topic is welcome.
When the de Groot foundation came to us with the idea for the Paris Literary Prize in 2010, we immediately said yes. Shakespeare and Company has a long-standing tradition of opening its doors to aspiring writers and in keeping with that philosophy, the 10,000€ Paris Literary Prize is open to writers from around the world who have not yet published a book.
We have long been admirers of the novella, a genre which includes such classics as The Old Man and the Sea, Animal Farm, L'Étranger and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. The Paris Literary Prize celebrates this small but perfectly formed genre while giving a unique opportunity to writers whose voices have not yet been heard.
Awards
There are three Paris Literary Prize awards:
The Paris Literary Prize award: 10,000 Euros
Two Paris Literary Prize Runner-up awards: 2,000 Euros eachAll three winners will be invited to a weekend stay in Paris to attend the
Prize ceremony and read from their work at a special event at
Shakespeare and Company.Last year, the winner of the Paris Literary Prize was Rosa Rankin-Gee for The Last Kings of Sark ; the two runners-up were Adam Biles for Grey Cats, and Agustin Maes for Newborn.
Selection Process & Jury
The selection process for the Paris Literary Prize occurs in two phases. First, our dedicated team of readers (numbering 12 in 2011) goes through each submission in search of exceptional stories, voices and craft and a long list of roughly 10% of entrants is then chosen for closer inspection. After many hours of reading and debate, this is again reduced to form the short list, between 10 and 15 entrants. This is where our Jury takes over, spending a month with the texts before selecting the winner and two runners-up.
To ensure the quality and diversity of the selections, each submission is considered by several readers (for instance, in 2011 each text was viewed at least five times).
The identity of all entrants is withheld throughout the process.
2012 Jury
Erica Wagner will again be chairing the jury for this year’s prize, with the remaining members to be decided shortly. For the list of 2011 readers and jury click here.
Erica Wagner is Literary Editor of The Times and writes a weekly column in the Saturday Review section of the paper. She has interviewed many of the world's leading writers. Erica's books include Gravity, a collection of short stories, and Ariel's Gift, a biographical gloss on Ted Hughes's Birthday Letters. Her novel, Seizure, was published in Britain and the US in 2007. Seizure is published in France as La Coupure by Au-delà du Raisonnable. She has judged many literary prizes; the Man Booker, the Orange Prize, the Whitbread First Novel Award, and the Forward Prize. She lives in London with her husband and son. www.ericawagner.co.uk
Rebecca Carter is a literary agent with Janklow & Nesbit. She worked for fifteen years as an editor at Random House UK. As a publisher, her acquisitions were wide-ranging, from literary to more genre-led fiction, novels light and dark, for old and young, set everywhere from Afghanistan to Acton, and non-fiction in the areas of history, memoir, travel, food- and nature-writing, political and cultural polemic, often mixed together and with a strong emphasis on story.
Born in Paris in 1981, Sylvia Whitman was educated in Edinburgh, and studied History at University College London. She has been the manager of Shakespeare and Company in Paris since 2006, perpetuating the spirit of the legendary bookshop, founded by her father George Whitman in 1951.
