Deborah Rogers Foundation Announce 2020 DRF Writers Award
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Submissions open on 1st June and close on 31st October 2019
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Ian Rankin to chair the judges
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The Deborah Rogers Foundation announce that submissions for the 2020 DRF Writers Award will open on 1st June 2019 and close on 31st October 2019.
The judges of the 2020 DRF Writers Award will be Ian Rankin (Chair), Sarah Perry and Max Porter. They will announce the shortlist of three in April 2020 and the Award will be presented in London in mid-May 2020.
The winner of the 2018 Writers Award was Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line by Deepa Anappara, which will be published in February 2020 and has already sold in eighteen countries.
THE 2020 DRF WRITERS AWARD
£10,000 will be presented to a first-time writer whose submission demonstrates outstanding literary talent and who needs financial support to complete their work:
- Submissions should take the form of 20-25,000 words of a work in progress, fiction or non-fiction, which is not under option or contract.
- Applicants may not be under contract to any publisher for any work or title in any language.
- Applications are open to writers who have not previously published a full-length book of their own prose writing (including self-published or published on-line) excluding a collection of their own poetry. They may have published short prose writing within a magazine/anthology.
- Entrants must write in the English language and reside within the British Commonwealth and Eire.
- Submissions should be accompanied with a brief synopsis and biographical note.
- Applicants who submitted work for the DRF Writers Award previously may re-apply but the work submitted must be new.
- The winner receives a cheque of £10,000 and each runner-up receives £1,000.
JUDGES OF THE 2020 DRF WRITERS AWARD
Ian Rankin is the internationally bestselling author of the Inspector Rebus and Detective Malcolm Fox novels, as well as a string of standalone thrillers. His books have been translated into thirty-six languages and are bestsellers on several continents. Ian is the recipient of four CWA Dagger Awards and in 2004 won America’s celebrated Edgar Award. He is also the recipient of honorary degrees from the universities of Abertay, St Andrews, Hull and Edinburgh, and received the OBE for services to literature, opting to receive the prize in his home city of Edinburgh, where he lives with his wife and two sons.
Sarah Perry was born in Essex in 1979. Her first novel, After Me Comes the Flood, was longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and the Folio Prize, and won the East Anglian Book of the Year Award in 2014. The Essex Serpent was a number one bestseller in hardback, Waterstones Book of the Year 2016, and the British Book Awards Book of the Year 2017. Her most recent novel, Melmoth, was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas prize. Her work has been translated into twenty languages. She lives in Norwich.
Max Porter’s first novel, Grief Is the Thing with Feathers won the Sunday Times/Peter, Fraser + Dunlop Young Writer of the Year, the International Dylan Thomas Prize, the Europese Literatuurprijs and the BAMB Readers’ Award and was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and the Goldsmiths Prize. It has been sold in twenty-nine territories. His second novel Lanny was a Sunday Times Top 10 bestseller and has sold in twenty-two territories. Max was previously editorial director at Granta, where his authors included Eleanor Catton, Han Kang and Rebecca Solnit. He now lives in Bath with his family.