GQ offers student writers a month's residency at Norman Mailer's home

GQ has launched a student non-fiction writing competition with a unique prize - £1,000 plus a month living at Norman Mailer's house in Provincetown. Plus, the winner gets a chance to be published in GQ.

All you have to do is serve in the Philippines, get drunk, head butt Gore Vidal, co-found The Village Voice, stab your wife after a row after a party and win the Pulitzer - twice.

Actually, you need do none of those things. The competition is open to all undergraduates and post graduates at UK universities who are over 18 and can live at Mailer's house, now a writers' centre, in Massachusetts, USA, in July.

Mailer had six wives, a great byline, a reputation as a Neanderthal and womaniser. Oh, and he was one of America's best writers.

GQ editor Dylan Jones, who launched what will be an annual competition today at the Arts Club in London, recalled how Mailer, who died three years ago, once said:

"If a person is not talented enough to be a novelist, not smart enough to be a lawyer, and his hands are too shaky to perform operations, he becomes a journalist."

Jones said the award was designed as an antidote to continual predictions about the state of print journalism.

"We at GQ believe, as do our friends at the Norman Mailer Writers Colony, that there will always be a need and a place for brilliant narrative, non-fiction, whether that's journalism, criticism or memoir."

Jones said he urged "any student who hopes to avoid a bleak future in law or medicine to stop what they're doing and start writing now, today".

The award has been set up by the magazine and the Norman Mailer Writers Colony, an educational centre based at the writer's home.

Apart from the library, which has been relocated, the home is just as it was, with even Mailer's whisky bottles still present, Jones said. "I slept in Mailer's bed in Provincetown reading Tough Guys Don't Dance, an extraordinary experience," he said.

Entries of between 2,000 and 4,000 words must be sent to gqmaileraward@condenast.co.uk by 1 May.

Judges include Jones, GQ feature director Alex Bilmes, Conde Nast managing editor Nicholas Coleridge, novelist Tony Parsons, editor of the Times Literary Supplement Peter Stothard and "platinum selling singer-songwriter" Lily Allen.

Full details available on page 232 of the March issue of British GQ and here.

Source: GQ magazine