UCL Publishers’ Prize 2017

Happy mid-week, everyone! To help keep us pushing on to Friday and that #fridayfeeling, here is the first of your bi-monthly featured posts from your lovely blog managers. This week I wanted to talk about something fantastic that comes out of the UCL MA Publishing cohort every year: the UCL Publishers’ Prize anthology.

Every year members of our course make up the publishing team for the UCL Publishers’ Prize, a celebration of creative writing from UCL students, undergrad, postgrad, and recent alumni. Since 2014 we have seen four fantastic anthologies produced by the MA Publishing students, including two for 2016 under the themes of Phosphenes and YA Fiction. This year is no different – submissions for the 2017 Prize opened on the 18th of November 2016, accepting writing to the theme ‘Metamorphosis’. They will close (!!!) at the end of January 2017. All submissions will be considered for publication by the team (under a cloak of anonymity), and the ones selected for the anthology will go to an expert panel of judges to award commendations and prizes for the top three. Stay tuned on the Prize’s twitter and facebook for announcements of what these are!

This year’s title ‘Metamorphosis’ has been chosen to tackle and promote key themes of diversity, within the publishing industry and the wider world, and an ever-present desire for progress and change. These are discussions we have been continuously having, both in class and out, and it seems fitting to match this with the writing theme. This year’s Prize seeks to represent the widest amount of voices possible, and promote thought and discussion on a range of topics and ideas. The team is working very hard, as ever, to ensure an anthology that is a vehicle for fantastic, diverse writing; to represent the ‘metamorphosis’ that we are continually going through and should not ignore, nor slow down.

The prize will (if all goes to plan) launch in June at the UCL Festival of Culture. Alongside this, ebook editions of the past prizes will soon be available on Amazon – please go download one to support the publication of this year’s prize! – and there will be a series of events to promote and celebrate the anthologies and their authors, both past and present.

For more information, and the submission guidelines, please see the Publishers’ Prize website here. It’s very pretty and very informative!

Follow the Prize on social media: on twitter @pubprize2017, on instagram @uclpubprize2017, and on facebook here. The prize will be tweeting on #mymeta with updates and more so make sure to give it a follow, and use the hashtag to connect with them!

I’m definitely excited to see what they produce this year and to get it on my bookshelf, and I hope you are too!

Have a good week everyone!

Helena