A former winner of the Eccles Centre Writer's Award, Andrea Wulf, who won a year's residency at the British Library in addition to a £20K prize in 2013, said at Hay today, "It was the best writing year I have ever had in my life".
The Eccles Centre for American Studies is based at the British Library and in this, the eighth year of the award, a partnership has been launched with Hay Festival.
The Eccles Centre and Hay Festival Writer's Award is open to authors of both fiction and non-fiction for a current project relating to the Americas (North, Central and South America and the Caribbean), and welcomes submissions in Spanish as well as other indigenous languages.
The partnership builds on Hay Festival’s growing presence in Latin America and the increasingly international reach of the Award, which was founded by David and Mary Eccles in 1991 to support novelists in the creative stages of writing.
The opportunity to carry out research at one of the world's most prestigious libraries will have support from the BL curatorial team and it is expected that winners will make one or more research trips lasting weeks or months.
Previous winners include Olivia Laing, Erica Wagner and Naomi Wood.
Andrea Wulf's event following the launch was about her latest work, a graphic non-fiction follow-up to The Invention of Nature, entitled, The Adventures of Alexander von Humboldt, the greatest scientist and explorer of his era, and the father of environmentalism.
For more information on the Award, go to bl.co.uk/writers-award.
Left to right: Christina Fuentes La Roche, Andrea Wulf, Phil Hatfield, Catherine Eccles, Peter Florence
Picture by Marsha Arnold
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