We are delighted to announce the shortlist for the 2025 Fitzcarraldo Editions/Mahler & LeWitt Studios Essay Prize, an annual competition for unpublished writers. Initially made possible by an Arts Council Grant in 2015, the prize awards £4,000 to the best proposal for a book-length essay (minimum 25,000 words) by a writer resident in the UK & Ireland who has yet to secure a publishing deal. In addition to the £4,000 prize the winner will have the opportunity to spend up to three months in residency at the Mahler & LeWitt Studios in Spoleto, Italy, to work on their book. The book will then be published by Fitzcarraldo Editions. The shortlist, chosen out of 119 entries, is as follows:
— Tesserae by Phoebe Braithwaite, a moving meditation on rootlessness, creation and the work of a life. Tesserae takes as its central figure the artist George Mayer Marton, who left Vienna for England in 1938 after Austria-Hungary’s annexation by Germany. Some time after his arrival in Britain, George – who is the author Phoebe Braithwaite’s great-great uncle – by now exiled, widowed, with nearly all his work burnt in the Blitz, began to rebuild his life and artistic practice, painting in oils and making mosaics in a Cubist style, producing new wholes from broken pieces. Tesserae follows that method, assembling fragments into a larger shape, blending theory, diary entries, images and narrative to create a new texture of its own, mirroring George’s artistic process and the process of becoming a person, becoming new. Phoebe Braithwaite is a writer and researcher based in London. Her work has been published by outlets including the New Statesman, the Times Literary Supplement, Tribune, Dissent, the New York Review of Books, Art Review, Apollo and frieze. She is an Honorary Research Fellow at the Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Racism and Racialisation at University College London, and a Fellow at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard.
— My Great Novel by Cassandre Greenberg, an essay about a novel in progress. Its structure is a narrative of trials about the formation, and possible failures, of a written text. In spirit, a book about craft, where life as craft is the story, My Great Novel will answer questions about the desire to write in the twenty-first century. Inspired by genre-bending and genre-defining texts such as TOAF by Renee Gladman and Aliens & Anorexia by Chris Kraus, the essay will use the events of an author’s life to explore the fraught metafictional space of composition, or what Danielle Dutton describes in her introduction to TOAF as the years ‘that are full of writing but also other kinds of living – and full of failure, too.’ Cassandre Greenberg is a writer. She graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art in 2019, and was awarded the Michael O’Pray Prize in the same year. She has published articles in The Architectural Review, The White Review and Art Monthly, and had works and texts commissioned by the BBC, Dazed, NTS, the ICA, SPACE Studios, Auto Italia, The Approach, Ginny-on-Frederick and others. She writes an intermittent email newsletter at https://foulaftertastes.substack.com.
— On Refusal by Sarai Kirshner. Taking its roots in the space between two walls – The Wailing Wall, a space of prayer and ritual where conscripted teenagers take their oath to the Israeli Defence Force, and the West Bank barrier which dispossesses and divides Palestinian communities – Sarai Kirshner’s On Refusal traces acts of refusal to serve in the Israeli military. Merging the lyric essay form with ethnography and auto-ethnography, the sections composing this essay move across different points in time in which refusal took place, either by individuals or collectives. Each section brings forward a political-personal-historical narrative combined with cultural criticism, interrogating narratives of refusal, their echoes, impasses and ripples throughout the world. In the present moment, when war has unevenly occupied mundane life and the lines between the two have become blurred, On Refusal asks what we lose and what we hold onto when we refuse to partake in the battlefield and its apparatus. Sarai Kirshner is a writer, artist and researcher. Her work asks how power takes form in landscapes, bodies, and social relations and has been presented and published in various venues in the UK and beyond. Her grandmother’s tongue was German, her mother tongue is Hebrew, and she writes in English and lives in London.
— Crapes by Hana Loftus, which forms a portrait of an apple farm named Crapes and its keeper, Andrew Tann; and a study of uncertainty, experimentation and adaptation. Originating as a chronicle of a year on the farm – a detailed record of the weather, soil, trees and of Andrew himself, from the perspective of a curious neighbour – the essay expands to form an exploration of land, climate and economics, the food we eat and the plants that produce it, and the uncomfortable relationship between ecological conservation, heritage and living culture. Spanning across scales, from the minute observation of the seasonal cycle on the farm, to the long view of the last century of rapid change, and onto the future that starts to take shape towards the end of the year, Crapes examines how humans and plants adapt, in a mutually dependent tangle, to unpredictable change. Hana Loftus is a writer based in Essex. She co-directs an architecture and planning practice, and writes regularly for outlets from Apollo and Icon to architecture and planning journals.
— Gully Cricket by Abhinav Ullal. While helping his parents pack up their recently sold family home, Abhinav Ullal discovered an old notebook containing his brother’s ‘Guide to Gully Cricket’. Moved by this discovery, Ullal reconnects with his brother, and they begin setting aside time each Sunday to retrace their childhoods. Set against the turbulent backdrop of India from 1991 to 2001, Gully Cricket is the personal handbook of two siblings attempting to reconcile the past by codifying their beloved childhood pastime: gully cricket, and a moving exploration of memory, identity and place – weaving through themes such as post-colonialism, resistance, caste, social class, community, gender and ecology. Abhinav Ullal is a writer and creative director based in London.
— Show Us the Body by Claire Wilmot, which explores the relationship between doubt and power, what counts as evidence, and what it means to be believed. Emerging from a decade of research inside carceral systems in America, Britain, Nigeria and beyond, the essay traces desires for certainty in the wake of broken political promises. Beginning in the Baltimore Central Jail, where AI algorithms are used to determine a person’s ‘risk’, and so their eligibility for release on bail, Show Us the Body weaves together ‘scenes’ of doubt gathered in opaque criminal-legal systems and post-conflict environments, drifting through the manosphere and online ‘truther’ forums, rummaging through lesser-known archives of truth-producing technologies, past and present. Wilmot draws from her own life, as well as from literature, films and visual art in an exploration of burdens of proof, technologies that claim to produce knowledge that is disembodied and universal, and what we might discover on the margins of belief. Claire Wilmot is a visiting postdoctoral fellow in the Gender Studies Department at the London School of Economics, where she recently gained her PhD. She is also a journalist with the Bureau of Investigative Journalism as well as a freelance writer and visual artist. Her essays and reportage have been published in the London Review of Books online, the Guardian, the Atlantic, New Lines Magazine, and others.
Read more about the prize and entry requirements here.
