Announcement Regarding the Winner of the Büro BDP Writing Prize 2020

“The quality of this year's entrants was so high that choosing a winner was extremely difficult”, is the ultimate cliché when it comes to rejection letters and announcing award winners. This year, perhaps because of the year that was in it, and the time and reflection it has forced on us all, it has proven to be simply true. We felt that almost any of the shortlistees could have been the winner and be a fitting addition to the BDP list.

There might be something ridiculous or inherently dodgy about prizes, their inherent arbitrariness, the weird dynamics of pomp and power that hover nefariously underneath, but nonetheless we believe they can still serve a purpose, in this case, to support writers and artists in taking a leap, to spur people on to create new work that might otherwise not seem possible. 

The shortlist itself was hard to decide upon and we stretched the previously agreed upon 10 to 14 in order to better reflect the variety and quality of the work submitted this year, a selection of which can be read in Büro BDP Writing Prize 2020 Journal which will be published next week as a freely available ebook (a format chosen in order to disseminate it as widely as possible). 

Of the fourteen final entrants we had the caustically honest prose poetry of David Lindert that dealt so rawly with his personal experience of sex, drugs, love and mental health and Erin Honeycutt‘s ambitious libretto that uses a Basque-Icelandic pidgin to recentre the story of early modern trade routes and with it our conventual wisdom about the baroque.  Dayna Gross brings the Greek deity Thetis into her fiction as she explores bodily experience and photography in a unique and strongly realised voice.  There was also David Price‘s unremittingly honest take on autofiction, that dealt with the current, tumultuous year, and his place in it. Colm O‘Shea also skirts around autofiction, with his poetic reflections on a relationship in a refined, courageous style. Isabel Teitler, meanwhile pulls the same genre in a cinematic direction with her story of a hotel room tryst. Jonathon Lyon’s submission  meanwhile is a pulpy film script that “degenerates” into prose and examines its subjects as it revels in genre. Nat Marcus deploys poetry, prose, editorial pitches and interviews to explore the history of dance music, a mixtape collection of poetry and prose that was personal and collective at once, an artful representation of the remix in literary form. Theresa Kampmeier proposed an interactive website with an ecological narrative. Kelly Dignan’s simply told speculative fiction is unnerving in its apparent straightforwardness, as explored across a parallel world of stories. Marie Hjørnet Nielsen’s dystopian stories explore dark conceits through rich interior characters. Barry Sheils has written an excellent novel set in Northern Ireland that considers deeply what is pastiching and probes the figure of the writer for what it can still tell us about place and identity - all wrapped up in the guise of a crime novel. 

Finally we had two great proposals for books that straddle the fictional and the essayistic. The first, Things We Wore, is an exploration of identity and class structured through a series of items of clothing and focusing on Miriam Stoney’s account of a unique and strained relationship channeled through the medium of clothes written with a concise precision and almost brutal use of the sentence. 

The second entitled Troubles takes a much broader scope and deftly weaves together two separate storylines stretching across Europe and North America for what might be described as lived, embodied art history in fiction. 

Of these last two, despite much debate, no conclusion could be reached, and so finally, after looking again at the coffers we decided to split the prize between Miriam Stoney and Kristian Vistrup Madsen and offer each 700 euros and to publish their finished work in book format. We did not make this decision lightly, and we feel for the spirit of the prize - to promote new, bold and exciting writing - that to celebrate these two writers as joint winners makes the absolute most sense. We congratulate both these two deserving winners, and everyone else on the shortlist.

BDP and Babes Bar

THE DEADLINE FOR THE 2020 WRITING PRIZE HAS BEEN EXTENDED TO MIDNIGHT JUNE 30 DUE TO RECENT DISRUPTION.

Büro BDP and Babes Bar are delighted to announce for the second year running the Büro BDP Writing Prize, a prize dedicated to excellent new international writing that displays progressive and bold qualities in both form and content. Envisaged as a prize that takes its inspiration from the unique, cosmopolitan and open city of Berlin and its inhabitants the award will result in a book publication. The first prize in 2019 was awarded to Dani Arbid for his work ‘The Year of Things Lost’.

About

It is envisioned that this is a reward for the best contemporary (and for want of a better word) creative writing that isn’t afraid to be formally innovative, genre bending and which may point toward the possibility of a new, supra-national tradition . A familiarity with the BDP backlist may point toward the arena of literature and contemporary art in which the press is interested in producing.

The shortlist will be selected by the BDP team from which they shall choose a winner.

Prize

1st Prize: 1000 euro cash prize

The winner will have an opportunity to publish a book with Broken Dimanche Press in 2021 and excerpts from the shortlisted entries will be collected together in a journal, which will be published at the time of the prize giving.

Entry

The prize is open to anyone who who is resident in the EU and Associated Agreement countries

Entries should take the form of:

• A writing sample of up to 3000 words

• A description of the overall book

• CV or biographical note with contact email

• Order Number as proof of payment of entry fee (https://www.brokendimanche.eu/shop-1/the-2020-bro-bdp-writing-prize-1)

Entry fee is 10 euros. This goes towards running costs of the prize and its viable continued existence in the future.

Email bdpwritingprize@gmail.com

Deadline: midnight JUNE 30, 2020 (if you have already submitted you can re-submit free of charge)

Timeline

The deadline is JUNE 30, 2020 at midnight.

The shortlist will be announced on July 14.

The winner will be announced at a party at Babes Bar in Berlin at the end of August.

About The Supporter: Babes Bar

Babes Bar invites artists to create works, situations and performances across a variety of contexts: from dinners to karaoke to concerts. Since 2016 Babes Bar has hosted many events at venues including Agora, BQ Gallery, Berlinische Galerie, KW Institute for Contemporary Art and Martin Gropius Bau.