The Observer/Anthony Burgess Prize: closing date 29 February 2024
The deadline is approaching for the Observer/Anthony Burgess Prize for Arts Journalism. Find out how to enter here.
The 2024 Observer / Anthony Burgess Prize for Arts Journalism is accepting entries until 29 February 2024. In this newsletter, you can find out what we’re looking for and how to enter, and enjoy a review written by Anthony Burgess himself.
The Observer / Burgess Prize for Arts Journalism is an annual writing competition with a prize fund of £4,000 and a chance to be published in the Observer newspaper.
Maybe you’re a student, a blogger, or have never written before. All we ask is that you impress us with your best writing. Your entry should be a previously unpublished review (800 words maximum) of a new work in the arts. We’re looking to hear from new voices: this is not a competition for established writers and critics.
Our panel of judges — from the Observer and the Anthony Burgess Foundation — will award a first prize of £3000 and two runner-up prizes of £500.
Entries cost £10 each, and free entry is available for people with low incomes.
You can enter from anywhere in the world, and multiple entries are welcome, as long as your review is written in English.
The deadline for entries is 29 February at 11:59pm.
Anthony Burgess wrote for the Observer for more than thirty years, and this prize celebrates his long association with the paper. Burgess himself had a wide range of cultural interests, and there is no restriction on which artform you can write about.
The winning piece could be about an album, book, concert, exhibition, film, live stream, a piece of theatre, a TV show, video game, or anything else that offers the opportunity to write a lively and thoughtful piece, suitable for publication on the Arts pages of the Observer.
We define ‘new work’ in the arts as something which has appeared since January 2023, although some flexibility with that date is fine.
For examples of the kind of thing we would like to see, here are pieces by previous winners; and here is the Culture section of the Guardian and Observer website.
If you need inspiration, here is Anthony Burgess on Christopher Isherwood’s novel Down There on a Visit. This review was published in the Yorkshire Post on 8 March 1962.
‘Character Called Isherwood’ by Anthony Burgess
Who is Christopher Isherwood; what is he? Frame-maker and penny-plain prose-boy for twopence-coloured Auden; disengaged radical; Californian Vedanta-man; Quaker; Herr Issyvoo.
The sifted judgements of literary history are unfair, but the writer must bow to them. Posterity may kill the early demon-mother novels, Prater Violet and The World in the Evening, but it will cherish the inventor of a quietly revolutionary kind of fictional narrator — the stranger disguised as the author.
It was Somerset Maugham who implied that the best way to objectivity is through a show of subjectivity, that impersonality (the aim of modern naturalistic fiction) is best achieved through the first person. Isherwood went further: he created a character called Isherwood (Bradshaw in Mr Norris Changes Trains, but Bradshaw is one of the names of the Isherwood family). By this means he seemed to demonstrate the illusoriness of personality as a subsistent thing: we have only a succession of personae, with a camera behind each eyelid.
So here, in Down There on a Visit, we are presented with four personae, all called Christopher or Christoph or Chris or Chrissikins or other allomorphs. Surveying these four is the last persona of the series available — that of the author writing this book.
There is an episode for each persona, and for each episode a place and time (from Germany in 1928 to California in 1940) and also a dominating personality — Mr Lancaster (whom we have already met in London Magazine) or Ambrose or Waldemar or Paul. This, of course, is the method of Goodbye to Berlin.
What unifies? The apparent identity stamped on the personae, the march towards the Second World War, a theme implied in the title: Down There on a Visit is the private hell of alienation from the world of The Others; each main character suffers comically in it (Hell is a Comic Conception: discuss) and the final Christopher (the man who has written the book) learns through these hells to see the hell in himself.
We need not take this too seriously. What we must be very thankful for is that Novelist’s Gift which manifests itself less in the ability to shape and unify than in the marvellous flow of dialogue, the economical presentation of character, the sensorium which is always alive, the humour, the highly personal vision of the real world. This is a masterly work.
Find out more about the Observer/Anthony Burgess Prize for Arts Journalism, terms and conditions, and how to submit your entry.