Enter the 2024 Observer / Anthony Burgess Writing Competition
We're looking for the best Arts and Culture reviewers. The winner gets £3,000 and publication in The Observer.
The 2024 Observer / Anthony Burgess Prize for Arts Journalism is now open entries. This is a review-writing competition with a prize fund of £4,000 and a chance to be published in the Observer newspaper.
Maybe you’re a journalist, critic or blogger – or none of those. All we ask is you impress us with your best work. Your entry should be a previously unpublished review of up to 800 words on new work in the arts.
If you decide to enter you will be in the running for a first prize of £3000, with two runner-up prizes of £500.
We welcome entries from anywhere in the world, but entries should be in English.
Read the review written by the winner of last year’s Prize:
The winning entry for 2023’s Observer / Burgess prize was En Liang Khong.
His review explored the work of Tanoa Sasraku, a Plymouth-born artist who delves into the hillsides of the West Country and beyond to explore landscape, identity and vision. The exhibition ran at the Vardaxoglou Gallery, London, at the end of 2022.
The runners-up were Luke Hallam, who wrote about The Backstreets, the first book in English by Uyghur writer Perhat Tursun, and Cerise Louisa Andrews, who reviewed ‘Hallyu! The Korean Wave’, a colour exploration of popular culture in South Korea.
The Journalism of Anthony Burgess:
Anthony Burgess wrote thousands of articles for dozens of periodicals and his journalistic writing is a hugely important part of his creative legacy.
As well as being a prolific novelist, Anthony Burgess had a ceaseless energy for writing journalism. Because of a faulty diagnosis of a fatal brain tumour in 1959, Burgess was determined to make a living from writing, and it was clear that being a novelist alone was not the way to do this. Writing in 1984, he says, ‘the rewards of the serious novelist are meagre, and he needs journalism to augment his insufficient earnings from art’.