Announcing the Sandra Carpenter Prize for Creative Nonfiction

First Pages Prize is honored to partner with the Sandra Carpenter Memorial Fund to offer a special, additional prize for an American woman writer of creative non-fiction.

Photo credit: Magnus Glans, Scandinavian Traveler 2/11/16

About the Sandra Carpenter Prize for Creative Nonfiction

This award recognizes an emerging American woman writer with a $500 monetary prize and partial developmental editing of her creative nonfiction manuscript entered into the First Pages Prize. The Sandra Carpenter Prize winner will be announced at a presentation at The American Library in Paris (travel to attend would be at the winner’s expense), a city that inspired a long tradition of American writers, including Gertrude Stein, Edith Wharton and Sylvia Beach, writer and founder of the noted Shakespeare & Company bookstore. 

The American woman writer can be living abroad currently. To be considered, enter your creative nonfiction entry into the First Pages Prize by 2/2 (extended deadline 2/16).

What is ‘creative nonfiction’?

This genre takes many forms. As described by Wikipedia:

Forms within this genre include biography, autobiography, memoir, diary, travel writing, food writing, literary journalism, chronicle, personal essays, and other hybridized essays.

According to Vivian Gornick, "A memoir is a tale taken from life—that is, from actual, not imagined, occurrences—related by a first-person narrator who is undeniably the writer. Beyond these bare requirements it has the same responsibility as the novel or the short story: to shape a piece of experience so that it moves from a tale of private interest to one with meaning for the disinterested reader." 

How to enter?

Go here to read all the guidelines and enter your creative nonfiction to the First Pages Prize competition now.