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There are just a couple of weeks left before the deadline for this year's Bridport Prize. Anyone can enter and there are some big money prizes to be won alongwith the chance for your work to be read by a top agent. I have never entered this particular competition as I've always been a bit intimidated by it - so I'd be interested to hear readers' opinions on it. The Bridport Prize International Creative Writing Competition was founded in 1973 and now attracts many thousands of entries from over 80 countries. You can now enter online or via the post using the application form which can be printed off from the website. There are two categories - short stories up to 5,000 words and poems 42 lines maximum both with a top prize of £5,000. Second prize is £1,000 and third £500 with ten supplementary prizes of £50 each and the top 26 stories and poems will be published in the Bridport Prize 2008 anthology. All 26 winners are invited to a Prizegiving Lunch at the Town Hall in Bridport, Dorset. An additional £100 and a perpetual trophy is awarded to the best local (Dorset, UK) winner or runner up. The winning stories and shortlist will be read by London leading agents with a view to representing writers. Helen Simpson will judge the short stories Short stories will be judged by writer Helen Simpson who said: "The short story form is intrinsically witty, adrenalised, quick--not restful. It encourages concision. VSPritchett described, 'How did the story change as I rewrote it, perhaps four or five times, boiling down a hundred pages into twenty or thirty, as I still do? Story writing is exacting work.' I'll be looking for stories which show imaginative pleasure in meeting the demands of the form." The Bridport website explains: "In many cases a win in the Bridport Prize has led to further successes and helped to launch new writers. Kate Atkinson (a short story winner in 1990) said that it was very important, confirming that she had found her "voice". Her short story went on to become the first chapter of her novel, "Behind the Scenes at the Museum", winner of the 1995 Whitbread Book of the Year. She returned to judge the Short Story section in 2001. Other noteworthy names include Helen Dunmore (also a 1990 winner) whose "Spell of Winter" won the Orange Prize for Fiction in 1996; Tobias Hill, a winner in both categories (poetry 1994, short story 1996) and Tess Biddington, a winner in 2000, who made it onto the short list for The Forward Prize and gained an agent for her forthcoming novel, plus many others." The Prize is open to anyone, including non-UK applicants,over 18 years. Entries must be entirely the work of the entrant and must never have been published, self-published, published on any website or broadcast. Closing date is June 30th 2008. Each entry costs £6. More details from www.bridportprize.org.uk

I don't read much adult literature these days (although I did recently read Steve Martin's Born Standing Up and highly recommend it,) and I NEVER read Dean Koontz, so this might have completely passed me by. But in a Publisher's Weekly article about the importance of post-Christmas bookstore sales, (December 3, 2007, Vol. 254, No.48, p. 20) it was mentioned that the paperback release of Kate DiCamillio's The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane has been bumped up. Why, you ask? And what does this have to do with Dean Koontz? Well, evidently the book features heavily in Koontz's Brother Odd, and Candlewick, the publishers of "Tulane" are hoping to snag some adult readers, all on the basis of that connection. I for one can't argue with their reasoning. As a high schooler I read Candide--which was brutal, I might add-- simply because of the lyric, "It's just like a scene out of Voltaire" (That's from Duran Duran's Last Chance on the Stairway, just in case you didn't already know!) And I read Moby Dick as a preamble to Nathanial Philbrick's In The Heart of the Sea (although I probably should have read them in reverse. I recommend that one, too, BTW.)

I'd love to know if the strategy works. If it does, I wonder if it will lead to product placement among authors--prearranged mentioning to connect adult readers to kids books and vice versa. Actually, now that I think about it, I hope the strategy fails spectacularly! Far too contrived. I guess it's a shame that I found no value in my reading of Voltaire, but at least I got there on my own.