Bookshop offers free books for life

London-based independent bookshop Heywood Hill is to award one reader its Library of a Lifetime prize which will see the winner "never have to buy a book again".

To mark its 80th anniversary, Heywood Hill will give the winner of its Library of a Lifetime award “one newly published and hand-picked hardback book per month, for life, delivered anywhere in the world”.

To be in with a chance of winning the prize, readers have been asked to nominate the book that has meant the most to them, with the winner chosen at random in a prize draw. The title must have been published in English, or translated into English, after 1936, the year Heywood Hill was founded.

The Mayfair shop was founded by George Heywood Hill on 3rd August 1936.

Karin Scherer, senior bookseller at Heywood Hill, said: “For the winner, it will be an intellectual adventure of a lifetime … Every reader in the world will want to know about this life-changing prize. Whoever wins the first prize will never have to buy a book again. Instead they can look forward to a lifelong relationship with our bookshop and our booksellers.”

Second prize will be a one-year subscription to Heywood Hill’s A Year in Books subscription service, and third prize a hardback book every other month for a year. Once the competition closes on 31st October, the shop will use the entries to pull together a list of books covering the last 80 years of English-language books.

According to the Guardian, authors including Kazuo Ishiguro, Donna Leon and William Boyd have already put forward their own nominations. Ishiguro has nominated Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Devils (Penguin Classics), Leon for Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy (Penguin Modern Classics) and Boyd for Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire (Penguin Modern Classics).