Republic of Consciousness 2022: Judges Announced/Submissions Open
Submissions are open for The Republic of Consciousness Prize for Small Presses 2022. Publisher can enter via our website, here.
Books published in the calendar year 2021 are eligible, and submissions close in November 2021. The prize is open to works of fiction by a single author published by a small press in the UK and Ireland with five or fewer full-time employees or equivalent. We are the only prize in the UK that welcomes long form, short form, English language and translated fiction.
Over the past five years the prize has recognised 38 small presses from 13 towns and cities in the UK and Ireland, and awarded over £60,000 in prize-money to publishers and authors in that time. Last year half of the £20,000 prize fund was awarded to the long list, with the other half distributed among the shortlist – a literary prize first.
THE 2022 JUDGING PANEL:
KATE BRIGGS is a writer and French to English translator based in Rotterdam, Netherlands. She is the author of This Little Art (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2017), and in 2021 was a recipient of a Windham Campbell Prize for non-fiction.
WENDY ERSKINE’s short story collection Sweet Home (2018 Stinging Fly, 2019 Picador) won the Butler Literary Award, was shortlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize and the Edge Hill Prize, and was longlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize and the Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award for the story ‘Inakeen.’ Her stories and non-fiction have been broadcast on BBC Radio 3 and 4, and have also published by Rough Trade Books, Tangerine Press, The Common Breath, Repeater, No Alibis Press, Faber & Faber and Dostoyevsky Wannabe. Her new collection Dance Move will be published by Stinging Fly and Picador in early 2022.
MARTIN KOERNER is general manager at Waterstones Piccadilly.
This year’s prize fund will be in excess of £10,000. How it will be distributed is yet to be determined, but it remains our mission to support as many small presses as possible. As usual, there will be no fees asked of the publishers at any stage of the process, and prize-money will be split between publishers (70%) and authors (30%).
The prize is support by the Arts Council of England, and a university collective including: UEA Publishing Project, University of Westminster and University of Kent. More partners will be announced later in the year.
Prize money is also raised through the Republic of Consciousness Book Club.