Nine Dots Prize Launches With $100,000 Prize for Unfinished Book

Posted on October 21, 2016

A new book prize will be one of the world's richest: offering the winner $100,000. And best of all -- the book doesn't even have to be written yet. The Nine Dots Prize rewards original thinking "in response to contemporary societal issues." Every two years the board poses a new question in October. Entrants must submit a 3,000 word answer to the question. The answer will be used as the basis for a book expanding on their answer. The prize is $100,000, which is twice the amount of the Booker Prize.

The innovative new literary prize was created to "promote, encourage and engage innovative thinking to address problems facing the modern world." It is named after the nine dots puzzle, a lateral thinking puzzle that requires one to think outside the box to solve the puzzle.

Each entrant will submit a response to the question in 3,000 words or less, an outline for am 25,000 - 40,000 word book on the subject, and a justification of why the entrant will successfully complete the finished book within 9 months of winning. The contest is open to anyone over 18 and the entries must be in English. The deadline is midnight on Tuesday, January 31st. The first question is: "Are digital technologies making politics impossible?"

The new prize is sponsored by the Kadas Prize Foundation and the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) at the University of Cambridge and Cambridge University Press. The winning book will be published by Cambridge University Press. The prize's Chairman of the Board is Simon Goldhill, director of CRASSH. He is a Professor in Greek Literature and Culture and Fellow of King's College, Cambridge. Professor Goldhill explains, "This is an incredibly exciting and unique opportunity for thinkers to table big ideas that have the potential to change the world. The Board will be looking for entries that display originality in everything from the ideas put forward to the ways in which those ideas are communicated. Respondents are entirely free to critique, agree or disagree with, or reject the premise of the question, but they must engage with it fully and insightfully."