Michael O'Pray Prize 2019

Returning for its third year, The Michael O’Pray Prize is an award for new writing on innovation and experimentation in the moving image. The winning applicant receives £500 and their text will be published by Art Monthly. The deadline for submissions is 11 November 2019. See more information on how to submit below.

The Prize is named in memory of the critic, historian and film programmer, Michael O’Pray. Over the course of his long and varied career, Mike was an impassioned and energetic champion of avant-garde cinema, highlighting the continuing influence of key figures from the past, while dynamically promoting contemporary talents in experimental film and video. In his writings, and in the many programmes he curated for Film and Video Umbrella and elsewhere, Mike always endeavoured to make radical, challenging, occasionally esoteric work accessible to a wider public – and it is with this in mind that the award seeks to encourage examples of imaginative, engaging writing that extols and advances this longstanding tradition of experimentation in film and video for a non-specialist audience.

One of our aims for the prize is that the platform it offers helps writers to receive future writing commissions. Previous winners have each gone on to contribute new articles for Art Monthly and an array of other publications.

The Panel:

Submissions will be considered by an expert panel including:

Dr Terry Bailey, Senior Lecturer, Programme Leader, Creative and Professional Writing, University of East London

Steven Bode, Director, FVU

Helen Cammock, artist and Turner Prize 2019 nominee

Chrissie Iles, Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz curator, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

Chris McCormack, Associate Editor, Art Monthly