23 January 2020
Profile Books and Aitken Alexander are delighted to announce Peter Riley as winner of the inaugural Profile Aitken Alexander Non-Fiction Prize for the best debut trade non-fiction proposal from an academic.
Peter Riley’s winning proposal, Strandings—for a book about beached whales and the remarkable people whose secret lives revolve around them—earns him a £25,000 publishing contract with Profile Books and representation by Aitken Alexander Associates literary agency.
“I entered this prize because I was interested in speaking to a broader audience than conventional academic publishing usually allows,” says Riley; “being shortlisted for this prize was brilliant enough; winning it has been life-changing.” A literary academic and Melville scholar at The University of Exeter, Riley has been on the trail of the mysterious whale scavengers since an unforgettable encounter in his teens.
“Strandings wasn’t at all the sort of thing we thought we would find when we launched the prize,” says Ed Lake, Editorial Director at Profile Books. “Peter is a Melville expert, and in Strandings, with its wild cast of characters, oblique political meditations and sense of the absurd, he channels a very Melvillian spirit. But this is a strange and bold take on contemporary nature writing, and it emerges from a lifelong personal obsession as much as it does from Peter’s scholarly interests. The one thing we were clear about was that his story and his writing were just extraordinary.”
Chris Wellbelove said: “Strandings is on the one hand about British eccentricity, but on the other is about ideas that are universal: obsession, our connection with the animal world, and the plight of our oceans and the creatures that inhabit them. We can’t wait to share it with readers and publishers all over the world.”
Lake and Wellbelove, alongside Matthew Reisz, Books Editor at Times Higher Education, historian and professor Margaret MacMillan and mathematician and author Eugenia Cheng, selected Riley’s proposal from more than eighty entries submitted from academics across the UK and internationally, writing on subjects ranging from the uses of graphene to the history of Fire Island.
Scholar Claire Horn’s Eve, a proposal about the likely social ramifications of artificial human gestation, was highly commended by the judges.
The 2020 Profile Aitken Alexander Non-Fiction Prize
Owing to Covid-19 restrictions, the deadline for the Profile Aitken Alexander Nonfiction Prize has been extended to June 30, 2020. The prize was set up to encourage popular writing from expert voices. It offers a £25,000 publishing contract to the author of the best trade nonfiction proposal, as determined by a panel of judges.
The competition is open to those with a PhD or an equivalent qualification, graduate-level lecturers in a University or College, and senior researchers at an institute or think-tank. The submission must be for an author’s first trade non-fiction book and must be focused on an area in which the entrant holds a post-graduate qualification. Submissions must be written in English and take the form of a 3,000-4,000 word outline or essay setting out the intended subject, argument and approach for a non-fiction trade book. The closing date for entries is June 30, 2020, and the winner and three runners-up will be selected by a panel of judges.
The inaugural 2019 prize went to Peter Riley’s Strandings, a proposed work of literary nonfiction about whale strandings. “I entered this prize because I was interested in speaking to a broader audience than conventional academic publishing usually allows,” said Riley, a literary academic and Melville scholar at the University of Exeter. “Being shortlisted for this prize was brilliant enough; winning it has been life-changing.”
To enter, please email your proposal in Word format to: [email protected]
Further details here.
Full terms and conditions of the prize
1) Eligibility
- The competition is only open to those with a PhD or an equivalent qualification, graduate-level lecturers in a University or College, and senior researchers at an institute or think tank.
- Submissions must be focused on a subject in which the submitter holds a post-graduate qualification.
- The submission must be for the author’s first trade non-fiction book. Submitters who have been previously published trade non-fiction in their field will not be eligible.
- The decision of the Prize Judges as to whether a work is eligible shall be final and binding.
2) Submission Format
- The submission should take the form of a 3,000-4,000 word outline or essay setting out the intended subject, argument and approach for a non-fiction trade book.
- The authors of the three best submissions as determined by the panel of prize judges will receive guidance from agents at Aitken Alexander, either in person in London or by phone, to produce an expanded book proposal. The best proposal as determined by the judges will receive a £25,000 advance and a publishing agreement with Profile Books, care of Aitken Alexander Associates.
3) Rules of Entry (how to submit a proposal)
- [email protected]
- Proposals must be written in the English language.
- Proposals must be submitted directly by the author.
- Proposals may have no more than two authors.
- Only one proposal may be entered by each author.
- Proposals must be submitted by June 30, 2020.
4) Conditions of the Prize
- Profile Books retains the right of first refusal to publish every submission, which persists until the announcement of the winner.
- Any publication agreement entered into as a result of the prize may only be cancelled in accordance with normal warranties as set out in the contract.
- Any offers of publication will include all rights including audio, eBook, and translation.