The Novelry Offers $100,000 Prize to Break Publishing Barriers

The Novelry, an online creative writing school founded by Booker Prize–longlisted author Louise Dean, has launched a $100,000 writing prize aimed at reaching writers outside traditional publishing circles. With submissions closing July 31, the Next Big Story competition has already received over 5,000 entries and expects to reach more than 10,000 total submissions. An entry requires the first 1,500 words of manuscript and a $15 admission fee, submitted through Submittable.

Dean said the competition aims to reach nontraditional writers. "What I'm really interested in is reaching people who would exclude themselves from writing way before they got to apply for scholarships and bursaries," she told PW. "These are the sort of people who would have been where I was and made the assumption that to be a writer, you've got to be clever or posh. I don't think I had those, therefore, I won't. But I discovered that in fact, you don't need either of those, and they can be quite detrimental."

The competition requires only the first three pages of a novel concept, an approach Dean said targets "real people who probably love really high drama, high concept things" and "probably heavy consumers of genre fiction."

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