New Media Writing Prize

The New Media Writing Prize was established in 2010 by James Pope and Sue Luminati as part of the inaugural Poole Literary Festival. From 2011 until 2021 James Pope directed the competition and awards event at Bournemouth University. Lyle Skains is the current director. Support has come from internal funding, and a wide range of external sources including if:book UK, a 'think and do tank' run by the late Chris Meade. The main prize was renamed the Chris Meade Memorial UK New Media Writing Prize in 2021. As of 2023 there is also a student award, an Opening Up Award, a Digital Journalism Award and an Interactive Digital Narrative for Social Good Award.^[2] Some years have also included a People's Choice Award.^[3]

The competition has built an international reach and reputation amongst makers and academics in the filed of digital storytelling. A 2012 article in The Independent described the prize with a mix of sarcasm and appreciation, starting with the tagline "It's writing, Jim, but not as we know it."^[3] The article describes the shortlisted works and encourages readers to vote, although its interviews with traditional publishers who assure the reader that it's "still OK to love real books" has been criticised.^[4]

Winning and shortlisted works are archived by the British Library,^[5][6] and on establishing the archive, archivists and prize organisers co-authored a paper outlining challenges of archiving interactive, multimodal literary works.^[7] Several winning and shortlisted works were showcased in the 2023 British Library exhibition "Digital Storytelling".^[8]