#uclpubprize

So thanks to the fantastic work of Clays Printing, we finally have our gorgeous book shipped and ready to go. It is so unreal to hold months of work from so many contributors in our hands, but we on the committee could not be any happier with the results.

It will still be a few weeks before the book is available and we will keep you posted on where and when. However, we are really grateful to finally have it arrive in the mail.

So thank you everyone who has helped us make it to this point. Thank you Zoë Horn Haywood for the fantastic cover design, again Clays Printing for producing the book, and to all of our sponsors, especially the main financial backer for the print run, JFIGS, who for the third year in a row has helped our books become reality. And of course, thank you authors for writing such marvellous stories to fill the pages.

The team has been working tirelessly (especially our fabulous editorial team) to get this year’s anthology together, so we are happy to announce that the book has finally been sent to the printer. In the next few weeks, we will be delivered our bundle of joy.

It will be wonderful to hold something that we’ve been working on for so long in our hands and, as we are weird book lovers, don’t be shocked if we inhale deeply to take in that new book smell. While their is nothing wrong with ebooks, there is something special about holding the physical object in your hands after reading it on a screen for the past five months. We hope that authors will feel even more ecstatic as they see, for the first time in many cases, their work in ink and professional binding.

While we wait for their arrival, we are busily planning the launch of the book once they are delivered and stocked on the bookshelves of Gower Street’s Waterstones. We cannot wait to officially meet the authors, whom most of the team only know through the story they wrote and email correspondence.

A few weeks ago, we were lucky enough to be invited by two of our judges, Lucy and Laura from Spread the Word, to the launch of their newest book Upshots and Other Stories, which is the title of the London Short Story Prize 2015 Anthology.

At the launch, many of the authors read extracts from their pieces. All of the readers were wonderful and the creativity and effort put into their stories was evident. One story struck us in a different way, however, due to its refreshingly unique way of formatting the story.

James Woolf’s “R v Sieger: additional documents disclosed by the Crown Prosecution Service” is a story about the mental breakdown of Helen Sieger, told in a typical understated, “keep calm and carry on” British fashion. What set this story apart in our minds was not the story itself (though it was a powerfully funny one in its own right), but that it was told not by the typical first or third person point of view, but through documents (transcribed phone calls, emails, newspaper clippings, etc.).

I think anyone who has taken a creative writing course has had that one classmate (or perhaps you were that classmate) who has tried to be “artsy” by writing their story in an unconventional way. While you can applaud them for trying something new and the creativity of the idea, the novelty is limited if the story behind it isn’t as powerful. What is so wonderful about Woolf’s story is that it is not only genuinely pushing the conventions of form, but it does not do so at the expense of the story. The story took a risk and succeeded beautifully. 

The rest of the stories are of course fantastic, so don’t think we are playing favourites. We only highlight “R v Siegar” because this year’s Prize strove hard to allow our writers the freedom of form and to show how stories can be told in different formats, and Woolf’s story is a perfect example of how this freedom can produce something delightfully unconventional. 

So thanks again to Lucy and Laura for the invite and congratulations to all the authors in this year’s anthology!

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This Tuesday-Thursday, the group took a field trip to one of the publishing industry’s biggest events of the year, the London Book Fair. 

Out in West Kensington, the Olympia convention centre was a wonderland of books from all over the world. From big companies like Penguin Random House, who were negotiating deals on possibly hundreds of books, to humble us, who had the previous years’ books as well as posters and stickers to promote our new anthology.

There were talks, readings, and discussion panels. Two of our fellow UCL publishing project groups had their own events. The first was a panel discussion called “Platform Wars,” hosted by Interscript Journal (follow at @interscriptUCL), which talked about the future of academic publishing. The second was the official launch of Colour Me In Shakespeare (follow at @colourthebard), a booklet of original Shakespeare colourable illustrations. It was an exciting week for everyone in the course and it was great to see our classmates show off their amazing work.

It was also a wonderfully overwhelming experience to go through the rows of booths that all had people with a passion for books and who are making voices and ideas heard in ever corner of the globe. While publishing is spilt by genre, corporate models, mission statements, and friendly competition, there was a real sense of solidarity to have so many companies under one roof.

Many members of the team were happy to have a little vacation from internships to attend the fair and we all hope that it won’t be our last time. We are also grateful that we were able to share our project with the wider publishing world.

We are happy to announce that our wonderful judges have finally picked the winners of this year’s Publishers’ Prize! All of the stories were wonderful, but our panel found these three works to be best of the best. Congratulations to the three authors below:

Third place is awarded to “Lovey-Dovey” by Helena Schob, a thought-provoking story of a man and a wild bird.

Second place is awarded to “The School for Peculiarly-Sighted Children” by Emma Levin, a delightfully funny tale of a school of children who see things in a supernatural way.

And finally, first place goes to “Phosphenes” by Annie Warren, a heartbreaking tale of lost love and unfinished crossword puzzles.

We are so happy to be able to reward these authors for their superb stories. Of course, we wish we could give the award to all of our writers, and they will be receiving free copies and their own celebration in May. However, the judges have singled out these three as the best of the exceptional group. 

The short story has been a staple for our Prize. The first edition was made entirely of them. During the second year, however, the prize encouraged flash fiction submissions, which gave writers a chance to stretch their creative muscles. It’s hard enough to write an entire story in just a few thousand words, so try writing one in a couple of hundred. 

This success inspired us to open our prize even more, stating that we were not concerned with how the story was presented, just that the story was told in the best way the author knew how (though for the anthology format we still had to enforce a pesky word limit). We did this because while the short story is a very respectable form, it is not the end all be all for short creative writing. 

Most of the submissions were still short stories this year, but some did venture into the unknown and we were very excited to see authors trying different things. Poetry, creative essays, footnotes, crossword puzzles, etc. It makes our book stand out when there are so many anthologies that stick more strictly to one form over another.

Creative writing can be expressed in so many different packages and we want readers to see how UCL students are pushing the boundaries in more ways than just ideas and prose. Not that we don’t love our short stories, but all stories are not meant to fit that mould. We hope that next year’s committee will continue to encourage new forms of creativity and that next year’s book will have even more variety!    

This week is an exciting one because we will be revealing which pieces will be featured in the book this year! 

As we have said before, they are all truly amazing and we cannot wait to see them in book form as we put the finishing touches on editing, lay them out in InDesign, and send them off to print.

We do apologise for any piece that we had to decline. We hope this does not discourage you from writing. It might be that the story was just not quite ready and you can fix it up to submit elsewhere (or even next year if you are going to be around.) It may have just been that we felt it did not fit with what we were looking for, which is unfortunately just up to our collective taste, which is fallible. Most writers have to deal with some rejection in their career, many of the most famous having to deal with a lot. So if a piece did not make it in, don’t take it to heart.

To the authors who will be featured, we say thank you for being part of this year’s anthology. At this point, you will not only be published, but will be invited to the book launch party, which we are organising as we speak. And maybe, just maybe, you will be awarded more if our judges find your work particularly enchanting or thrilling. Keep your fingers crossed. Remember, however, to enjoy this moment as well, especially if this is your first publication. Even if it isn’t, never let the novelty wear off. You’ve accomplished something that many will not in their lifetime, so feel free to pat yourself on the back.