Mogford Prize 2015 entries sought

£7500 on offer for best short story on food and drink

Entries are now being sought for the 2015 Jeremy Mogford Prize for Food and Drink Writing, the annual short story competition run by the FT Weekend Oxford Literary Festival in association with Oxford Gastronomica, part of the Oxford School of Hospitality Management at Oxford Brookes University. Food and drink has to be at the heart of the tale. The story could, for instance, be fiction or fact about a chance meeting over a drink, a life-changing conversation over dinner, or a relationship explored through food or drink. It could be crime or intrigue; in fact, any subject as long as it involves food and/or drink in some way. Applicants are invited from anywhere in the world. They can be published or unpublished authors, but the entry itself must be previously unpublished. The story should be up to 2500 words and must be written in English. Entries should be submitted by email as a Word document to the mogfordprize@oxfordliteraryfestival.org by January 1, 2015 (one submission per person and not previously published). Entrants should also supply their home address, email and telephone number, their age and profession. The winning entry will be announced at the FT Weekend Oxford Literary Festival in March 2015 and the winner will be presented with £7500. The 2014 winner was Guy Carter, a London-based caricaturist, for his entry, Carnivores. He received a cheque for £7,500 from Jeremy Mogford (both pictured above), owner of The Old Parsonage, The Old Bank and Gee’s, at a celebration dinner at Gee's restaurant in Oxford. There were almost 400 entries submitted from all over the world but judges preferred Carnivores, the tale of an exclusive restaurant franchise serving exotic meats that had an unsavoury twist at the end. All entries submitted remain the property of the entrant. However, the FT Weekend Oxford Literary Festival, Mogford Group and their subsidiaries/associates retain the right to publish the winning and highly commended entries without fee – including the right to print an excerpt for use on festival promotional materials, for example website/brochure and in any festival media or broadcasting coverage, without fee; and the right for entries to be read in public during the festival without fee.