Wednesday, November 09, 2016

Charles Brasch Young Writers’ Essay Competition celebrates Landfall’s 70th

Charles Brasch portrait by Clifton Firth


 
In 2017 Landfall will celebrate its 70th birthday. To mark the occasion, editor David Eggleton and Otago University Press are pleased to launch the Charles Brasch Young Writers' Essay Competition, open to writers aged 16 to 21.

The competition is named after Dunedin editor, poet and patron Charles Brasch, who founded Landfall in 1947 and was its editor for the next two decades.

Brasch’s influence on New Zealand literature and art is significant and far-reaching: as well as being a meticulous and demanding editor, he was a philanthropist and (often anonymous) patron of the arts. He gave generous support to individual artists and writers, was involved in establishing the University of Otago’s Burns, Hodgkins and Mozart arts fellowships, and bequeathed his extensive collection of New Zealand art and literature to the Hocken Library.

As founding editor of Landfall, Brasch aimed to forge links between literature and its social and political contexts. He published imaginative writing and literary criticism alongside social and cultural commentary, and wanted the journal’s perspective to be ‘distinctly of New Zealand without being parochial’.

Current Landfall editor David Eggleton says the purpose of the competition is to encourage young writers towards achieving the highest standards of literary expression in the art of the personal essay. ‘The ability to write in a sparkling, informed, questioning, self-aware way on any subject — to make it new all over again — is the mark of the finest writing. Landfall wants to receive essays that show this promise from the next generation of emerging writers.’

The Charles Brasch Young Writers’ Essay Competition will be an annual award. Entries will be judged ‘blind’ by Landfall editor David Eggleton. The winner receives $500 and a year’s subscription to Landfall.
 
Entries for the inaugural competition open on 1 December 2016 and the closing date for receipt is 31 March 2017. The winning essay will be published in Landfall 233 in May 2016.

For further details about the competition visit:
http://www.otago.ac.nz/press/authors/awards/otago625789.html

No comments: