THE 2024 NOVEL PRIZE IS OPEN TO SUBMISSIONS

Fitzcarraldo Editions, Giramondo and New Directions are pleased to announce that The Novel Prize, a biennial award for a book-length work of literary fiction written in English by published and unpublished writers around the world, is open for submissions from 1 April 2024 to 1 June 2024.

The Novel Prize is a biennial award for a book-length work of literary fiction written in English by published and unpublished writers around the world. It offers $10,000 to the winner and simultaneous publication in North America by New York-based New Directions, in the UK and Ireland by the London-based Fitzcarraldo Editions, and in Australia and New Zealand by the Sydney-based publisher Giramondo. 

The prize rewards novels that explore and expand the possibilities of the form, and are innovative and imaginative in style. Jessica Au’s Cold Enough for Snow, the inaugural winner in 2020, was selected from close to 1,500 submissions worldwide, and was published in March 2022. Cold Enough for Snow has since been sold into over twenty territories, and was the recipient of the Victorian Premier's Literary Award in 2023. The shortlisted entries in 2020 were Glenn Diaz’s Yñiga, Emily Hall’s The Longcut, Christine Lai’s Landscapes, Nora Lange’s Us Fools, and Lani Yamamoto’s Ours and Others’.

Selected from the submissions of close to 1,000 writers, Jonathan Buckley and Anne de Marcken shared the 2022 Novel Prize for their novels Tell and It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over, both published in March 2024. The shortlisted titles for the 2022 Novel Prize are Darcie Dennigan’s Forever Valley, Marie Doezema’s Aurora Australis, Florina Enache’s Palimpsest, Vijay Khurana’s The Passenger Seat, Valer Popa’s Moon Over Bucharest and Sola Saar’s Anonymity Is Life. 

Jonathan Buckley’s Tell is a probing, exuberant and complex examination of the ways in which we make stories of our lives and of other people’s. Structured as a series of interview transcripts with a woman who worked as a gardener for a wealthy businessman and art collector who has disappeared, and may or may not have committed suicide, it is a thrilling novel of strange, intoxicating immediacy. Jonathan Buckley is a writer and editor from the West Midlands, now living in Brighton. In 2015 he won the BBC National Short Story Award for ‘Briar Road’, and he is a regular contributor to the Times Literary Supplement. Tell is his twelfth novel.

Anne de Marcken’s It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over is a spare, haunting novel that asks how much of your memory, of your body, of the world as you know it – how much of what you love can you lose before you are lost? And then what happens? The protagonist is adrift in a familiar future: she has forgotten her name and much of what connects her to her humanity. But she remembers the place where she knew herself and was known, and she is determined to get back there at any cost. She travels across the landscapes of time, encountering and losing parts of her body and her self in one terrifying, hilarious, and heartbreaking situation after another. A work of remarkable originality, It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over plumbs mortality and how it changes everything, except possibly love. Anne de Marcken is a queer interdisciplinary artist and writer living on unceded land of the Coast Salish people in Olympia, WA, in the United States.

In Cold Enough for Snow, a mother and daughter travel from abroad to meet in Tokyo: they walk along the canals through the autumn evenings, escape the typhoon rains, share meals in small cafés and restaurants, and visit galleries to see some of the city’s most radical modern art. All the while, they talk: about the weather, horoscopes, clothes, and objects, about family, distance, and memory. But uncertainties abound. Who is really speaking here – is it only the daughter? And what is the real reason behind this elliptical, perhaps even spectral journey? At once a careful reckoning and an elegy, Cold Enough for Snow questions whether any of us speak a common language, which dimensions can contain love, and what claim we have to truly know another’s inner world. Jessica Au is a writer based in Melbourne, Australia. 

The Novel Prize is managed by the three publishers working in collaboration, with New Directions reading submissions from the Americas, Fitzcarraldo Editions from Africa and Europe, Giramondo from Asia and Australasia. 

Prior to the launch of the Novel Prize in 2020, Fitzcarraldo Editions ran an annual novel prize for authors resident in the UK and Ireland. Adam Mars-Jones was awarded the 2019 Fitzcarraldo Editions Novel Prize for Box Hill, a strangely tragic love story between two men set in the gay biker community during the late 1970s. The winning novel was one of 321 submissions, and one of five to be shortlisted. The other shortlisted entries were Line by Niall Bourke, Zealandia by David Hering, Breath by Amanda Oosthuizen, and Quinn by Em Strang. 

Jeremy Cooper won the inaugural Fitzcarraldo Editions Novel Prize in 2018 for Ash before Oak, a novel in the form of a nature diary, obliquely charting the narrator’s slow return to health. The winning novel was one of 181 submissions, and one of six to be shortlisted. The other shortlisted entries were Semblance by Thomas Bunstead, The Cremation Project by Andrea Mason, Tinder and the Moon by Marianne Morris, Total Abstraction by David Musgrave, and Never Connect by Duncan White. 

TERMS AND CONDITIONS

Please read these eligibility and entry rules carefully before submitting. Submission of an entry is taken as acceptance of the entry rules. For any queries not covered below, please info@fitzcarraldoeditions.com. 

1) The competition is open to published and unpublished writers around the world. Writers based in Africa and Europe should submit to Fitzcarraldo Editions. Writers based in the Americas should submit via New Directions; writers based in Asia and Australasia should submit to Giramondo. For more information please visit thenovelprize.com.  

2) Entrants residing in Africa and Europe should submit a full manuscript of their novel (minimum 30,000 words) to novelprize@fitzcarraldoeditions.com. The manuscript should be double-spaced, 12pt. 

3) Each submission should include a cover letter including a biographical note, contact details and brief outline of the novel. 

4) The submission must be original.  

5) Entries can also be sent by post to Fitzcarraldo Editions, A103, 8-12 Creekside, London SE8 3DX. 

6) Only submissions received by email or by post by midnight on 1 June 2024 (GMT) will be considered. 

7) Entries that are incomplete, corrupted or submitted after the deadline will not be considered.

8) The entry must be the entrant’s own original creation and must not infringe upon the right or copyright of any person or entity.

9) Co-authored entries will not be accepted. 

10) Writers who have existing contracts, or who have previously held contracts, with publishers for books of fiction or non-fiction are eligible to enter. 

11) Writers who have published writing (fiction or non-fiction) in magazines and journals are eligible to enter.

12) Writers who have published books of poetry are eligible to enter.

13) Writers may submit only one manuscript per iteration of the prize. 

14) The novel must be written in English (no translations).

15) Submissions may be made by the author of the novel or (if they have one) their agent.

16) There are no age restrictions, and we welcome submissions from writers of all backgrounds. 

17) Submissions from writers residing outside of Africa or Europe will not be considered or passed on to the relevant publishers.

18) All submissions should include page numbers.

19) The novel must be original and should not have been previously published anywhere in full. Published work is taken to mean published in any printed, publicly accessible form, e.g. anthology, magazine, newspaper. It is also taken to mean published online, with the exception of personal blogs and personal websites.

20) A shortlist will be announced in January 2025. The winner will be announced in February 2025, and published in early 2026. 

21) Fitzcarraldo Editions, Giramondo and New Directions reserve the right to organise a meeting or phone call with all shortlisted writers to discuss their novel before the award of the prize. 

22) Unsuccessful entrants will not be contacted.

23) No editorial feedback will be provided to unsuccessful entrants.

24) The decision of the judges is final and no correspondence will be entered into regarding the judging process.

25) Fitzcarraldo Editions, Giramono and New Directions will have the exclusive world rights to publish the winning novel.

26)  Fitzcarraldo Editions, Giramono and New Directions reserve the right not to award the prize this year, or to make multiple offers of publication. 

27) Only submissions which meet all Terms and Conditions will be considered.

28) By entering this competition, each entrant agrees to be bound by these Terms and Conditions.