Equivocality

This was the contest announcement for the 2007 Writer’s Travel Scholarship.

Welcome to this year’s Writer’s Travel Scholarship. This time around the even has special significance for me, because I am myself travelling again. I write these words from the remote village of Ghourma-Rharous, a town of 3000 on the Niger river in northern Mali. Despite the river, this place is well and truly the Sahara, and the daytime temperature exceeds 40 degrees celcius. It is also the most remote place I’ve ever been to; the nearest paved road is hundreds of kilometers away, and there is no running water or electricity here. Except, of course, at the offices of a local aid agency from which has a generator, and also a microwave-relay internet connection. In a place where most of the population is illiterate, I’ve found a solid 128kps line. The world is a very strange place.

And I’m writing about it. Are you? If so, please enter the 2007 Writer’s Travel Scholarship. As usual, the prize is a round-trip ticket anywhere in the world. As usual, the basic rationale for the contest remains:

I think travel is good. I think writing is good. I think it is important that writers travel. I would like to support that cause, which is to my mind the effort to not only understand our world, but to communicate that understanding to others. Once again, I’m not necessarily interested in travel writing. I am not ruling out travelogues, to be sure, but I would like to reiterate that this is about writers traveling, not travel writing.

On to the details, essentially the same as last year:

• Applicants must submit a short piece, 10,000 words maximum. Fiction, non-fiction, whatever, on any topic, but let’s keep it to prose simply because I don’t feel competent to evaluate poetry.
• Also tell me a little about yourself, where you would go with your free ticket, for how long, and why. You can’t ever have been to that country before. You don’t have to write about your destination. I just want to know what about it inspires you to go through the considerable effort required to actually travel there.
• Email entries to wts (at) equivocality (dot) net by May 31st 2007. They will be judged by myself and my writer friends, the winner to be announced on June 15th 2007.
• All entries will by anonymized by a third party before review. (Yes, this means people I know may apply.)
• Entries must be previously unpublished, there is a limit of one entry per author, and the ticket is limited to $2000 US. I will book the cheapest available round-trip ticket, based on departure and return dates given to me by the winner. I will try to accomdate these dates and other preferences as much as possible, but I reserve the right to shift each date plus or minus up to a week, and to make other choices such as routing and airline, in order to find the best fare. Other travel requirements, such as additional destinations or an open return date, may be accommodated if the winner wishes to make up the difference in cost.
• By submitting a piece, you grant me (Jonathan Stray) limited web-publishing rights, specifically the right to display it on equivocality.net and any other sites of I may have some degree of editorial control over. I reserve no other rights. If someone sees your work here and wants to publish it, fantastic.
• All decisions are final, and by submitting a piece you agree that I am under no obligation to award any prize at all. The idea is also to fund a developing writer who might not otherwise be able to afford to travel, so please keep this in mind when considering whether to apply. I have no funding, no committees, no mandate. I’m doing this just because I think it’s a good idea, so let’s keep it simple.

Good Luck!