Enter the 2025 Observer/Anthony Burgess Prize for Arts Journalism
A call for entries from budding arts journalists and aspiring critics.
The 2025 Observer / Anthony Burgess Prize for Arts Journalism is open for entries.
This is a review-writing competition with a prize fund of £4000, and for the past eleven years it has been awarded in partnership with the Observer newspaper. Maybe you’re a journalist, critic or blogger — or none of those. All we ask is that you impress us with your best work. Your entry should be a previously unpublished review of 800 words on new work in the arts.
The winner will be awarded a prize of £3000, and there are two runner-up prizes worth £500 each.
We welcome entries from anywhere in the world, but entries should be written in English.
The journalism of Anthony Burgess
Anthony Burgess wrote thousands of articles for dozens of periodicals, and his journalistic writing is an important part of his literary legacy.
As well as being a prolific novelist, Burgess was highly productive as a journalist. After he became a full-time writer in 1959, it was clear that he could not make a living from writing novels alone. In 1984 he said: ‘The rewards of the serious novelist are meagre, and he needs journalism to augment his insufficient earnings from art.’
Read the winning entry from last year’s competition
The winning entry for the 2024 Observer/Burgess Prize was by Oscar Jelley, who wrote a review of Isabel Waidner’s novel Corey Fah Does Social Mobility. Asked to comment on the prize, Oscar Jelley says:
It was a massive honour to win the Anthony Burgess Prize in 2024, and seeing my piece in print in the Observer was a thrill. Writing about Isabel Waidner's enjoyably weird novel gave me a chance to think more generally about the value of strangeness in a literary culture that often seems to prefer things to be tame and 'tasteful.’ The fact that the piece resonated with the judges (and hopefully a few other readers) made me more determined to use my own writing to advocate for more odd and unruly kinds of art, whether as a critic or in some other form.
Oscar’s piece was published in the Observer in June 2024. You can read an extract below:
The novel’s style comprises a weird melange of idioms, sprinkled with foreign words that further deterritorialise the anonymous ‘international city’ in which it takes place. Despite a subplot about the playwright Joe Orton and a character with the surname Hölderlin, it often reads like literature for a post-literary age, one whose habits of expression are largely shaped by TV, video games, marketing and social media. Several times Fah deploys the phrase ‘what a concept’, which I’ve never encountered outside the notorious Smash Mouth single All Star. Overall, it’s an interesting approximation of the way people often talk and think now – in a stream of unmoored phrases and references, sporadically dispensing with extraneous prepositions and articles. If it makes for generally lively and distinctive prose, it sometimes falls short in the novel’s especially imagistic sections, where a more self-consciously artful style might have been called for.
Today’s bookshops are so glutted with tedious, well-behaved novels that it seems slightly churlish not to extol this one. Yet for all its ostentatious convention-bucking, it’s not clear how much of an alternative Corey Fah really offers. Near the end, Fah recalls days spent in public libraries ‘reading as if my life depended on it, and it did, it did’. This small moment is a nice reminder of why literature should not be the preserve of a moneyed elite: it has the power to liberate people from the fetters of circumstance. The surreal happenings in this book, however, are primarily allegories for the hard facts of systemic disadvantage, suggesting that imaginative literature can help the underprivileged to better understand the restrictions placed on them by accident of birth, but not to overcome them.
You can read Oscar’s piece in full at the Observer website.
How to enter
Anthony Burgess wrote for the Observer for more than thirty years, and this prize celebrates his connection with the newspaper. He had a wide range of interests, and there is no restriction on the artform featured in your review.
The winning piece could be about an album, book, concert, exhibition, film, audio drama, a piece of theatre or a TV show, or any other artwork which offers the opportunity to write a lively and thoughtful review.
'New work' in the arts means anything that has appeared since 1 January 2024, although we can be flexible about this date (for example, for a touring exhibition, or the revival of a stage play).
As examples of the kind of writing we would like to see, here are pieces by previous winners; and here are the Culture pages of the Guardian / Observer website.
You could win a first prize of £3000. Two runners-up will receive prizes of £500 each.
Entries must be received by 11.59pm on 28th February 2025. This year's judges include Sarah Donaldson, Deputy Editor and Arts Editor of the Observer, and Andrew Biswell, director of the International Anthony Burgess Foundation.
We will publish the longlist and shortlist after Easter, and the winners will be announced at an awards ceremony in May 2025.
The prizes are awarded by the International Anthony Burgess Foundation and the Observer.
Find out more
You can read Anthony Burgess’s journalism in two collections published by Carcanet.
The Ink Trade: Selected Journalism, 1961-1993 (edited by Will Carr)
The Devil Prefers Mozart: On Music and Musicians, 1962-1993 (edited by Paul Phillips)
You can subscribe to previous winners right here on Substack:
Oscar Jelley (2024)
Lucy Holt (2020)
Leah Broad (2016)