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The New Media Writing Prize
The New Media Writing Prize
Awarded for	Innovative digital stories using digital platforms, interactivity and multimedia
Country	United Kingdom
Presented by	Bournemouth University
Reward(s)	£1000
First awarded	2010; 15 years ago
Website	newmediawritingprize.co.uk

The New Media Writing Prize is an annual, juried competition in the United Kingdom awarding prizes to works of innovative digital fiction that uses interactivity, participatory elements and/or multimedia and achieves "good storytelling". Works that are shortlisted for the prize are seen as "cutting edge, exemplar works, which one might suppose demonstrate the best of everything that new-media storytelling can offer",^[1] and are archived by the British Library.

History

The New Media Writing Prize was established in 2010 by James Pope and Sue Luminati as part of the inaugural Poole Literary Festival. From 2011 until 2021 James Pope directed the competition and awards event at Bournemouth University. Lyle Skains is the current director. Support has come from internal funding, and a wide range of external sources including if:book UK, a 'think and do tank' run by the late Chris Meade. The main prize was renamed the Chris Meade Memorial UK New Media Writing Prize in 2021. As of 2023 there is also a student award, an Opening Up Award, a Digital Journalism Award and an Interactive Digital Narrative for Social Good Award.^[2] Some years have also included a People's Choice Award.^[3]

Reception

The competition has built an international reach and reputation amongst makers and academics in the filed of digital storytelling. A 2012 article in The Independent described the prize with a mix of sarcasm and appreciation, starting with the tagline "It's writing, Jim, but not as we know it."^[3] The article describes the shortlisted works and encourages readers to vote, although its interviews with traditional publishers who assure the reader that it's "still OK to love real books" has been criticised.^[4]

Winning and shortlisted works are archived by the British Library,^[5]^[6] and on establishing the archive, archivists and prize organisers co-authored a paper outlining challenges of archiving interactive, multimodal literary works.^[7] Several winning and shortlisted works were showcased in the 2023 British Library exhibition "Digital Storytelling".^[8]

Winners of the Main Prize

Year	Author	Title	Country
2010	Christine Wilks	Underbelly	United Kingdom
2011	Serge Bouchardon & Vincent Volckaert	Loss of Grasp	France
2012	Katharine Norman	Window	United Kingdom
2013	Esmeralda Kosmatopoulos	Siri and Me	Greece/France/Egypt
2014	Tender Claws (Samantha Gorman and Danny Cannizzaro)	Pry (novel)	USA
2015	The High Muck a Muck Collective (Jin Zhang, Thomas Loh, Nicola Harwood, Bessie Wapp, Fred Wah)	High Muck a Muck: Playing Chinese	Canada
2016	J.R. Carpenter	The Gathering Cloud	Canada/United Kingdom
2017	James Attlee	The Cartographer's Confession	United Kingdom
2018	Amira Hanafi	A Dictionary of the Revolution	USA / Egypt
2019	Maria Ivanova	The life of Grand Duchess Elizabeth^[9]	Belarus
2020	Dan Hett	c ya laterrrr	United Kingdom
2021	Joannes Truyens	Neurocracy	United Kingdom
2022	Everest Pipkin	Anonymous Animal

References

^ Pope, James (2020). "Further on down the digital road: Narrative design and reading pleasure in five New Media Writing Prize narratives". Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies. 26 (1): 35–54. doi:10.1177/1354856517726603. ISSN 1354-8565. S2CID 148623959.
^ "FAQs". New Media Writing Prize. Retrieved 2023-07-26.
^ ^a ^b "The Blagger's Guide To: New media writing". The Independent. 2012-11-24. Retrieved 2023-07-26.
^ Carpenter, J.R. (2019). "Writing on the Cusp of Becoming Something Else". In Jefferies, Janis; Member, Sarah (eds.). Whose Book is it Anyway? A View From Elsewhere on Publishing, Copyright and Creativity. Open Book Publishers. pp. 243–266. doi:10.11647/OBP.0159.10. ISBN 9781783746514.
^ "New Media Writing Prize | UKWA Topics and Themes". www.webarchive.org.uk. Retrieved 2023-07-26.
^ Clark, Lynda; Rossi, Giulia Carla; Wisdom, Stella (2020), Bosser, Anne-Gwenn; Millard, David E.; Hargood, Charlie (eds.), "Archiving Interactive Narratives at the British Library", Interactive Storytelling, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 12497, Cham: Springer International Publishing, pp. 300–313, doi:10.1007/978-3-030-62516-0_27, ISBN 978-3-030-62515-3, S2CID 225078876, retrieved 2023-07-26
^ Rossi, Giulia Carla; Pyke, Tegan; Pope, James; Skains, R. Lyle; Wisdom, Stella (2022). "The New Media Writing Prize Special Collection" (PDF). Electronic British Library Journal. doi:10.23636/kw7j-0274.
^ "Digital Storytelling in 2023: A New Year of New Media". blogs.bl.uk. Retrieved 2023-07-26.
^ Campbell, Andy (2020-04-14). "The Grand Duchess Elizabeth". New Media Writing Prize. Retrieved 2023-07-26.