Photography: Brian Slater 

The QuietManDave Prize, honouring theatre critic and writer Dave Murray, is now open for entries for its 2024 edition, encouraging submissions in all forms of writing. Writers are invited to submit flash fiction and non-fiction entries until Friday 25th October, 2024.

The prize aims to encourage short-form writing with no limitations on style or form, offering two £1,000 prizes for the flash fiction and flash non-fiction categories, as well as additional runner-up prizes for each category.

This year’s prize will be judged by theatre-maker Michael Pinchbeck, who co-founded Metro-Boulot-Dodo theatre company in 1997; Catherine Love-Smith, lecturer in Theatre at the University of York; and Mufaro Makubika, playwright and winner of the Alfred Fagon Award for Best New Play in 2017. 

aAh! speaks to prize judge Michael Pinchbeck to see what the judges are looking for this year. 

What stands out for you about QuietManDave? 

It celebrates a legacy of somebody who liked to write about theatre and film and art and life. It opens up a space for writers from across genres to platform their work. (The Prize) can be quite an experimental space, it can be quite an innovative space. In the past we’ve had reviews, we’ve had recipes, we’ve had play scripts. We’ve had poetry and prose, so it’s a very diverse selection of submissions. It’s kind of restrictive, but it’s also quite liberating. It enables you to tell a story in a different way, in a different style. It may also get you to challenge your own writing practice.

What do you mean by challenge? 

The form itself is a challenge to write. We are not looking with a set of criteria. (The prize) brings together a range of different voices at a range of different stages in their careers. And I think that’s another way of celebrating the legacy.

What advice would you give to writers who are submitting to QuietManDave as their first competition? 

I’m thinking about writers that are maybe compelled to say something, or compelled to write something about the world today or their world today. What are the urgent, important narratives? It’s a turbulent time. It’s a challenging time and what is it in these 500 words that we can do to document that, or to challenge that. It’s sort of taking the temperature of both the world around us and of our world within us.

What for you differentiates between a submission that is very good and one that is exceptional? This of course is very subjective! 

It maybe has a distinctive voice, or it has a distinctive message or a distinctive style. We’ll be looking specifically for the ones that either speak a little bit more clearly, or a little bit more loudly about their own distinction? We don’t have criteria.

What writers or short form writers have you been inspired by?

Writers like Matthew Welton, who I used to know in Nottingham, I used to be part of the Nottingham writers studio with writers like John McGregor. And the work of writers/theatre-makers such as Deborah Pearson, Emma Bennett and Keisha Thompson. My influences for this prize would also come from poetry, maybe the haiku as a form and the potential that that has to distil and to condense. When I teach theatre, I often find myself saying less is more. I used to go to Edinburgh Fringe when I was in a theatre company and one of the shows I took was an hour and ten-minutes long.

An American performance artist saw it and said you need to pack a tighter snowball, which was a kind of metaphor for making it shorter and saying the same things, but in a more compact way. I think for this prize, the object is to pack a tighter snowball. I saw a recent performance by Princess Arinola Adegbite in the Poetry Library. I read it through before it was performed. And the way that it challenges the form and also wrestles with the notion of AI and how AI may be dictating our lives in other ways and can potentially dictate our after lives too is interesting.

Who are you reading at the moment? 

The book I read over the summer is Edmund De Waal’s The White Road, where he’s tracing the journey of ceramics over centuries. It’s a kind of archaeological dig, but it’s also a metaphorical mapping of a particular type of pottery. I think there’s something in his writing which is very fragmentary. How do we write something that is a fragment? And how do we piece the fragments together as a reader and how can a fragment make a whole? So I think there’s something in that idea, too. As Walter Benjamin says, ‘Thus traces of the storyteller cling to the story the way the handprints of the potter cling to the clay vessel’ (Benjamin, 1936: 5).

For more information about the prize and to enter, visit mmu.ac.uk/qmdprize. The competition closes at 5pm (UK time) on Friday 25th October, 2024