All entries for Thursday 10 July 2008

The Warwick Prize for Writing

Writing about web page http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/prizeforwriting/

How does writing evolve? Where is its moving edge? Is all writing – at its very best – a type of creative writing?

To explore these questions – and to identify excellence and innovation in new writing - the University is launching The Warwick Prize for Writing. This prize itself will help define where writing might be going; what new shapes and forms it may take; and even through what media it might be conducted - including electronic forms as well as the traditional form of a book. The value of the prize is a measure of the seriousness of our endeavour: £50,000.

This will be a very distinctive and high-profile project. The prize is unveiled to the world todayand the winner announced in February 2009. It is an international cross-disciplinary award which will be given biennially for an excellent and substantial piece of writing in the English language, in any genre or form, on a theme which will change with every award. The theme of The Warwick Prize for Writing in 2009 is Complexity.

I am tremendously excited about the Warwick Prize for Writing. It will underline the University’s position at the forefront of academic excellence. It also brilliantly reflects Warwick’s thematic approach to learning and reputation for literary and creative excellence. In keeping with the remit of the university, the prize aims to encourage a diverse and international range of entries. Submissions may be translations of a work first published in another language.

Who makes the nominations for this prize? As the Romani saying goes, ‘We are all one – all who are with us are ourselves’. To that end, we are writing to all members of University Staff and inviting them to make a nomination. We want everybody to be involved – nursery staff, cleaners, gardeners, professors and porters. Honorary professors and honorary graduates will also be asked to make nominations.

The winning submission will represent an intellectual, scientific and/or imaginative advance and be written with an energy and clarity that makes it accessible and attractive to a wide audience. In addition to the £50,000 monetary prize, the winning author will be awarded the opportunity to take up a short placement at the University, possibly within The Institute of Advanced Study or The Warwick Writing Programme, or a department of the writer’s choosing.

Let us look briefly at this year’s theme: Complexity. A particularly talismanic statement was once made by Christopher Zeeman, the founder of Warwick’s Mathematics Department and Mathematics Research Centre in 1964: ‘Technical skill is mastery of complexity, while creativity is mastery of simplicity’. Nominators for The Warwick Prize for Writing take note! The theatre writer Kenneth Tynan joked, ‘The sheer complexity of writing a play always had dazzled me. In an effort to understand it, I became a critic’. Complexity can be felt as a stone in the shoe of good writing, yet complexity might be part of the writer’s long and sometimes stony journey to simplicity. As the physician and poet Oliver Wendell Holmes said, ‘I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity’. The virtues of a complex book of poems or fiction might be in the apparent simplicity of its language, and in the subliminal patterning and codes that arc across such work. Art conceals art. The virtue of an accessible and exciting book of creative non-fiction about Fermat’s last theorem might reside in its style. In this latter case, art releases and refreshes knowledge: the art of style translates complex ideas with energy, simplicity and clarity. Yet these are hard-won qualities in writing. In fact they are highly complex processes.

To return to those questions that opened this blog. These are questions I ask myself all the time as a poet and as professor of creative writing at Warwick. When I was a young research scientist I found myself facing the same issues because I often reached a zone where the current knowledge simply tapered to nothing. When scientists reach this point, this moving edge of knowledge, they surf forwards by a combination of previous knowledge, guesswork, and intuition. They become poets; they write – and they imagine - themselves into presence. They create possibility. I always regarded science at this level as a form of creative writing. The physicist Niels Bohr observed, ‘When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images’. The best writing creates possibility.

My point is that, as with a poem or a paradigm, knowledge formation has a moving edge, a place where ‘not knowing’ is almost as important as knowing. If we accept that writing makes you think, and that the formation of knowledge depends partly on the complex and often playful process of writing, then what role does the process of writing play on that moving edge of knowledge? I imagine that the winners of The Warwick Prize for Writing will be situated on that very edge of ‘not knowing’ and knowing: a place of creativity, energy and adventure.

This has been a very exciting (and complex!) project to manage, and I wish to thank all those people who have kindly given their time to help make the project fall into place, and to the Vice-Chancellor for having the vision to make it happen.

David Morley : 10 Jul 2008 10:00 |  Tags: Poetry Prose The Practice Of Poetry |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem