THE deadline for submission into this competition is Thursday, November 30. Entries can be submitted electronically. Entry details can be found on The Guyana Annual’s Facebook page. Winning entries in each category will receive cash prizes and will also be published in the magazine. I am rushed and eager to remind the writing and reading public about this event simply because writing competitions are so rare in Guyana. There is the Guyana Prize, course, but a writing award that emerges from a magazine feels more contemporary, more intimate, in the same vein of other literary magazines and journals (Writers Digest, Wasafiri, etc.) around the world that offer writing awards. It is an important step within the context of the local Guyanese literary landscape – it is, in fact, an event – that local writers, particularly young writers, must take advantage of.

The Guyana Annual is over 100 years old and it has published several Guyanese writers who have gone on to become iconic in the field of Caribbean literature. The new prizes offered by the magazine in its newest incarnation is an important step in both publishing and preserving Guyanese literature, and it is a move that one hopes will both stimulate and promote Guyanese writing.
There are two competitions for both Short Story and Poetry (Open and Junior). This means that the competition caters to both more experienced as well as younger writers, rather than putting everyone to compete against each other, regardless of experience and age. Other categories include the Sheila King Award for Short Stories for Children, which is significant considering that if the issue of literature needs to be addressed in the Caribbean, then stories and poems designed with young readers in mind are an especially part of that plan. The Burt Award for Caribbean Literature is another initiative that seeks to reward writers who write for children.

The David DeCaires Prize for Journalism is another award being offered by The Guyana Annual. This is interesting, particularly because Guyana has never been a country that has been too obsessed with non-fiction writing. This is unfortunate because there is usually so much to be gleaned and appreciated from non-fiction work – a genre that comes with its own rules, styles and modes of expression. Gaiutra Bahadur’s fantastic non-fiction work, Coolie Women, has helped to bring non-fiction writing back into focus here in Guyana, and one hopes that the interest garnered over the past few years has remained and expresses itself in the form of submissions for the David DeCaires Prize, which, though limited to journalism, still falls into the category of non-fiction. Literature is a broad spectrum of works shaped using words. Non-fiction occupied a large portion of that spectrum, and it is indeed good to know that there are those willing to fund prizes for journalism, especially given the importance of the media in this current age of technology and a host of topics worth covering and bringing to the eyes of society.

There is also the Bertram Charles Prize for Drama – which rewards the playwright of a one-act play. The Drama category of the Guyana Prize for Literature does not, for some strange reason, reward writers of one-act plays. I have always felt that this carried an unfair implication that a one-act play was somehow less deep, less complex than a full-length play. So I am quite glad that the Annual is rewarding the writers or one-acts – the most common type of play in Guyana.
Other prizes include Hawley Harris Prize for Cartoon, the Stephanie Correia Award for Fine Arts, and the Bobby Fernandes Award for Photography. There is also a segment of the competition called the Tulsi Dyal Singh Oil and Gas Competition which offers a $250,000 prize to an essayist who chooses to write on one of several oil and gas related topics, such as Marine Mapping, Environmental Impact, Capital Inputs, Off Shore vs On Shore Implications, etc.
Clearly there is a range of prizes to be won from The Guyana Annual, and hopefully, this is the catalyst needed to create a range of writing from young Guyanese authors.