The New Media Writing Prize | |
---|---|
Awarded for | Innovative digital stories using digital platforms, interactivity and multimedia |
Country | United Kingdom |
Presented by | Bournemouth University |
Reward(s) | £1000 |
First awarded | 2010 |
Website | newmediawritingprize |
The New Media Writing Prize is an annual, juried competition in the United Kingdom awarding prizes to works of innovative digital fiction that uses interactivity, participatory elements and/or multimedia and achieves "good storytelling". Works that are shortlisted for the prize are seen as "cutting edge, exemplar works, which one might suppose demonstrate the best of everything that new-media storytelling can offer", [1] and are archived by the British Library.
The New Media Writing Prize was established in 2010 by James Pope and Sue Luminati as part of the inaugural Poole Literary Festival. From 2011 until 2021 James Pope directed the competition and awards event at Bournemouth University. Lyle Skains is the current director. Support has come from internal funding, and a wide range of external sources including if:book UK, a 'think and do tank' run by the late Chris Meade. The main prize was renamed the Chris Meade Memorial UK New Media Writing Prize in 2021. As of 2023 there is also a student award, an Opening Up Award, a Digital Journalism Award and an Interactive Digital Narrative for Social Good Award. [2] Some years have also included a People's Choice Award. [3]
The competition has built an international reach and reputation amongst makers and academics in the filed of digital storytelling. A 2012 article in The Independent described the prize with a mix of sarcasm and appreciation, starting with the tagline "It's writing, Jim, but not as we know it." [3] The article describes the shortlisted works and encourages readers to vote, although its interviews with traditional publishers who assure the reader that it's "still OK to love real books" has been criticised. [4]
Winning and shortlisted works are archived by the British Library, [5] [6] and on establishing the archive, archivists and prize organisers co-authored a paper outlining challenges of archiving interactive, multimodal literary works. [7] Several winning and shortlisted works were showcased in the 2023 British Library exhibition "Digital Storytelling". [8]
Year | Author | Title | Country |
---|---|---|---|
2010 | Christine Wilks | Underbelly | United Kingdom |
2011 | Serge Bouchardon & Vincent Volckaert | Loss of Grasp | France |
2012 | Katharine Norman | Window | United Kingdom |
2013 | Esmeralda Kosmatopoulos | Siri and Me | Greece/France/Egypt |
2014 | Tender Claws (Samantha Gorman and Danny Cannizzaro) | Pry (novel) | USA |
2015 | The High Muck a Muck Collective (Jin Zhang, Thomas Loh, Nicola Harwood, Bessie Wapp, Fred Wah) | High Muck a Muck: Playing Chinese | Canada |
2016 | J.R. Carpenter | The Gathering Cloud | Canada/United Kingdom |
2017 | James Attlee | The Cartographer's Confession | United Kingdom |
2018 | Amira Hanafi | A Dictionary of the Revolution | USA / Egypt |
2019 | Maria Ivanova | The life of Grand Duchess Elizabeth [9] | Belarus |
2020 | Dan Hett | c ya laterrrr | United Kingdom |
2021 | Joannes Truyens | Neurocracy | United Kingdom |
2022 | Everest Pipkin | Anonymous Animal |
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Digital storytelling is a short form of digital media production that allows everyday people to create and share their stories online. The method is frequently used in schools, museums, libraries, social work and health settings, and communities. They are thought to have educational, democratizing and even therapeutic effects.
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All the Delicate Duplicates is a single player first-person psychological/exploration game co-developed by Mez Breeze and Andy Campbell. Produced by The Space, One to One Development Trust - Dreaming Methods, and Mez Breeze Design, the game was published for Microsoft Windows in February 2017. It contains a non-linear story that's discovered through interactive elements and a text-based backstory.
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Samantha Gorman is an American game developer known for her combination of narrative, theatricality and gaming in VR environments, and for introducing gestural interactions in touchscreen narratives. She has won multiple awards for her work, both in the field of games and in electronic literature and new media writing. Gorman co-founded the computer art and games studio Tender Claws in 2014 and has been an assistant professor at Northeastern University since 2020.
#1WkNoTech was a netprov run in 2014 and 2015, led by Mark Marino and Rob Wittig.
c ya laterrrr is an autobiographical hypertext fiction written by Dan Hett about his experiences following his brother dying in the Manchester Arena bombing. It won the New Media Writing Prize in 2020.
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