“The Paris Literary Prize is an international prize for unpublished writers,
awarded for a novella. Any topic is welcome.
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 believe that a prize of this kind can make a difference in launching a new writer’s career.”
I came across this very interesting competition on the Irish Writers’ Centre Competitions page. I’ve always enjoyed novellas or short novels or whatever you want to call them. There’s the obvious ones like Of Mice and Men and The Old Man and the Sea of course, but my long time favourites have been Camus‘ The Outsider and Mann’s Death in Venice. I remember doing a presentation on The Outsider when I was at college way back when – can’t remember what God awful things I said but I’m sure I was frothing at the mouth with enthusuasm for it. These stories reflect the best qualities of the short novel/novella; a strong point of view that makes for gripping, albeit uncomfortable, reading mixed at times with a lyricism that seems to skirt around the concrete world offering a glimpse of another and often darker place.
Among great novellas that I’ve read relatively recently I have to include The Comfort of Strangers by Ian McEwan and The Violent Bear it Away by Flannery O’Connor. Definitely recommend them both. And of course a novella won the Booker Prize last year.
What the Hell is a Novella anyway I hear you say. Now if you had a story that was too long to be short and too short to be a novel you’d be somewhere close. In this competition they use a word count of between 17,000 and 35,000 to define the form. But there’s so much more that makes a novella a novella – that fearlessness you need to move beyond the confines of the shorter form coupled with the instinct to know what truly matters and just cut the rest. Even with an entry fee of €50 I’d be tempted to throw my hat in the ring. All the details you need are here. You have until September to piece it all together, so stop wasting time reading this…
