www.equivocality.net/writers-travel-scholarship

The Writer’s Travel Scholarship is an annual writing contest, now in its third year. The winner receives a round-trip ticket to anywhere in the world. Really.

This time around the event has special significance for me, because I am myself travelling again. I write these words from the remote village of Ghourma-Rharous, a town of 3000 on the Niger river in northern Mali. Despite the river, this place is well and truly the Sahara, and the daytime temperature exceeds 40 degrees celsius. It is also the most remote place I’ve ever been to; the nearest paved road is hundreds of kilometers away, and there is no
running water or electricity here. Except, of course, at the offices of the local aid agency which has a generator, and also a microwave-relay internet connection. In a place where most of the population is illiterate and starving, I’ve found a solid 128kps line. The world is a very strange place.

I’m learning, rapidly. And I’m writing about it.

Are you writing too? Not about the remote places in the world, perhaps, but about something that matters to you? If so, please enter the 2007 Writer’s Travel Scholarship. As usual, the prize is a round-trip ticket anywhere in the world. As usual, the basic rationale for the contest remains:

I think travel is good. I think writing is good. I think it is important that writers travel.

The Writer’s Travel Scholarship is my attempt to like to support the entwined causes of understanding and communication. Oh, I’ve written paragraphs before trying to explain why I think this is so important, but I’ve given all that up now. If you have to ask, I probably can’t explain it to you in the space of a contest announcement. Besides, I have better things to write today.

As before, I would like to make it clear that I am not specifically calling for travel writing. Write about your pet dog, if you can do it in an interesting an enlightening way. This contest is not about travel writing but writers travelling.

Now Acccepting Poetry! This is a change from prior years. How one can judge poetry against prose is something of a mystery to me, but then, I can’t really explain in any formal way how I (and my literary friends) judge one piece of prose against another either. Some writing is simply better than others. So this is something of an experiment, and hopefully we’ll see some interesting poems in with the prose pieces. Just make it good, okay?

On to the details:

Applicants must submit a short piece, 10,000 words maximum. Fiction, non-fiction, whatever, poetry or prose, on any topic.

Also tell me a little about yourself, where you would go with your free ticket, for how long, and why. You can’t ever have been to that country before I impose this restriction to encourage people to go somewhere new, rather than using the ticket to visit their overseas girlfriend. You don’t have to write about your destination. I just want to know what about it inspires you to go through the considerable effort required to actually travel there.

Email entries as an attached document in text or Word format to wts@equivocality.net by May 31st 2007. They will be judged by myself and my writer friends, the winner to be announced on June 15th 2007. There is no entry fee.

All entries will by anonymized by a third party before review. (Yes, this means people I know may apply.) To make it easy on us, please do NOT include your name in the submitted document file.

Entries must be previously unpublished, there is a limit of one entry per author, and the ticket is limited to $2000 US. I will book the cheapest available round-trip ticket, based on departure and return dates given to me by the winner. I will try to accomdate these dates and other preferences as much as possible, but I reserve the right to shift each date plus or minus up to a week, and to make other choices such as routing and airline, in order to find the best fare. Other travel requirements, such as additional destinations or an open return date, may be accommodated if the winner wishes to make up the difference in cost.

By submitting a piece, you grant me (Jonathan Stray) limited web-publishing rights, specifically the right to display it on equivocality.net and any other sites of I may have some degree of editorial control over. I reserve no other rights. If someone sees your work here and wants to publish it, fantastic.

All decisions are final, and by submitting a piece you agree that I am under no obligation to award any prize at all. The idea is also to fund a developing writer who might not otherwise be able to afford to travel, so please keep this in mind when considering whether to apply. I have no funding, no committees, no mandate. I’m doing this just because I think it’s a good idea, so let’s keep it simple.

Good Luck!