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The Warwick Prize for Writing is an innovative new literature prize that involves global competition, and crosses all disciplines. The Prize 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 winner of the inaugural Prize was announced on 24 February 2009 as Naomi Klein for The Shock Doctrine.
The winner of this award will receive £50,000 and the opportunity to take up a short placement at The University of Warwick.
The theme for the 2009 award was Complexity. The theme for the 2011 award was announced on 24 February 2009 and will be Colour.
Professor David Morley, Director of the Warwick Prize for Writing, and a former environmental scientist, writes:
How does writing evolve? Where is its moving edge? Is all writing - at its best - a type of creative writing?
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. They 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 creative 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 very edge of 'not knowing' and knowing: a place of creativity, energy and adventure."
