Five Ways of Being a Painting and other Essays by William Max Nelson and Garret Keizer and Karen Holmberg and Dasha Shkurpela and Patrick McGuinness and Laura Esther Wolfson

This collection brings together the six international winners of the £20,000 Notting Hill Editions Essay Prize 2017.

Contributors: William Max Nelson (winner), Karen Holmberg, Garret Keizer, Patrick McGuinness, Dasha Shkurpela, Laura Esther Wolfson.

Covering an array of subjects, from the meaning of art to supermarket shopping, these pieces were chosen for their originality, literary style, and above all, their ability to persuade.

The six finalists were chosen anonymously by the 2017 judging panel including:

ROSALIND PORTER (CHAIR) – Deputy Editor, Granta

TRAVIS ELBOROUGH – freelance writer, broadcaster and cultural commentator

KIRSTY GUNN – prize-winning author and Professor of Writing Practice and Study at the University of Dundee

DANIEL MENDELSOHN – internationally bestselling author, critic, and essayist

SAMEER RAHIM – former runner-up for the Notting Hill Editions Essay Prize, editor, critic and literary journalist

The judges awarded the first prize to ‘Five Ways of Being a Painting’ by William Max Nelson for ‘its curious mix of the philosophical and the personal, the argumentative and the ruminative that makes it a real essay’.

Judges described what they were looking for in the winning essays thus:

“I believe that writers are not always thinkers and thinkers are not always writers, but the strong essayist must be both.”

Rosalind Porter, chair of judges

“A good essay takes us right inside the mind of its writer and lets us roam about with his or her thoughts as they rise up on the page. It’s a journey as governed by contingencies and mystery and uncertainty and wonder as life itself, rich and surprising and charged by the power of the imagination and intellect.”

Kirsty Gunn

SPECIAL MENTION:

The following essays didn’t make the final selection but are deserving of a special mention. All demonstrated the qualities of literary merit and strong ideas. Faithful Traitors – Alice Ahearn; If This Must Be the Place – Rachel Andrews; On Being Passionately Moderate – Will Brett; African American Arts on the Color Line – Manthia Diawara; Love and Fear: Art in our Time – Ben Eastham; Medical Notes – Eliza Minot; Area Woman, or Netflix is the New Crack – Maureen Stanton