Lenarduzzi wins 2020 Fitzcarraldo Editions, Mahler & LeWitt Studios Essay Prize

Thea Lenarduzzi has won this year's Fitzcarraldo Editions, Mahler and LeWitt Studios Essay Prize, for her "family memoir and social history" proposal Dandelions.

The essay was one of six shortlisted proposals, chosen from 70 entries, and details the lives of two women "piecing together themselves and each other from the fragments of four generations’ worth of migration between Italy and England".

The annual competition awards £3,000 to the best proposal for a book-length essay, by an unpublished auhtor resident in the UK and Ireland. The prize-winner has the opportunity to spend up to three months in residency at the Mahler & LeWitt Studios in Spoleto, Italy, to work on their book, which will then be published by Fitzcarraldo Editions. 

This year's judges included Joanna Briggs, Brian Dillion, Joanna Kavenna, Paul Keegan and Jacques Testard.

Lenarduzzi, who is commissioning editor at the Times Literary Supplement, was one of six shortlisted writers chosen. 

The 2019 prize was won by Polly Barton, for Fifty Sounds, a personal dictionary of the Japanese language.