Every year the Fellowship invites entries for the £500 Essay Prize. It is awarded for a previously unpublished paper on George Eliot’s life or work.

The winning essay will be published in the George Eliot Review and on this website. The author will also receive two years’ honorary membership of the Fellowship.

The competition is open to all, but may be of particular interest to graduate students. Essays should not normally exceed 5,000 words, and should be typed (or printed out) in double spacing on one side of A4 paper, leaving margins of approximately 3.5cm. They should follow the MHRA (Modern Humanities Research Association) conventions, with single quotation marks for quotations,  and endnotes rather than footnotes for references. After the first full reference to a work in an endnote, subsequent references to that work should be given in a shorter form in brackets in the text, so that endnotes are kept to a minimum.

Alternatively, contributors may use either the author/date system or a list of Works Cited with references to those works given in brackets in the text.

Submissions should be accompanied by an abstract of about 100 words and sent as an email attachment to one of the editors: either Dr John Rignall at J.M.Rignall@warwick.ac.uk or Dr Tonny van den Broek at provowallis@icloud.com. The deadline for all submissions is the middle of December; the winning essay will be announced by the end of the following January.

The George Eliot Fellowship will appoint a panel of judges which will include a member of the Editorial Board of the George Eliot Review. The decision of the panel will be final.