Fitzcarraldo Editions, Giramondo and New Directions launch $10,000 Novel Prize

Fitzcarraldo Editions, Giramondo and New Directions are launching The Novel Prize, a $10,000 biennial award for book-length fiction by published or unpublished authors.

Alongside prize money, winners will have their work published simultaneously in the UK and Ireland by Fitzcarraldo, in Australia and New Zealand by Sydney publisher Giramondo, and in the US by New York’s New Directions.

Judges will be looking for novels which “explore and expand the possibilities of the form, and are innovative and imaginative in style”.

Submissions will be open from 1st April to 1st July 2020, with Fitzcarraldo Editions reading submissions from Africa and Europe, Giramondo from Asia and Australasia, and New Directions from the Americas. A shortlist will be made public in December 2020, with the winner announced in February 2021. The winning novel will be published in early 2022.

Fitzcarraldo Editions publisher Jacques Testard said: “Everyone at Fitzcarraldo Editions is thrilled to be working on the Novel Prize with Giramondo and New Directions, whose lists we admire enormously. After running our own novel prize for British and Irish writers for two years it’s very exciting to be ‘going global’ with two like-minded publishing houses. Nothing like this prize exists and I can’t wait to see what gem we unearth in this inaugural iteration.”