At the end of September, Heywood Hill – an independent London bookshop based in Mayfair – launched a new competition to celebrate their eightieth birthday and, to be frank, the prize is the kind of thing that dreams are made of.
Heywood Hill already offers a service they call ‘A Year in Books’, the ultimate subscription for book lovers. It isn’t cheap, but you can receive a hardback book, handpicked to your preference, every month for a year. The shop offers consultations for their subscribers, noting their likes and dislikes, before they begin the process of sending out beautifully wrapped books each month. A visit to the shop’s website is almost enough to convince you to take out a subscription there and then. Founded by George Heywood Hill in 1936, the shop has been a worldwide success for readers in every corner of the world and the ‘A Year in Books’ is a large part of that success.
The competition, however, takes the idea of the subscription one step further; you will win ‘A Year in Books’ subscription FOR LIFE. Yes, you read that right. You will receive a carefully chosen hardback book every month for the rest of your life. Heywood calls it ‘The Library of a Lifetime’, the ‘world’s first literary prize for readers’, and they claim the winner will ‘never have to buy a book again’.
It is remarkably easy to enter. All you have to do is go to the website and submit your choice of a book that has meant the most to you. The only stipulation is that it must have been published in English since 1936, the year that the shop was founded. That is it; I’ve already entered myself and it is as simple as it sounds. The hardest part will be choosing a book to nominate. At the end of the month, a random draw will take place and the winner chosen, with your own exclusive consultation following soon after. If you miss out on that amazing first prize, second and third are also pretty great; second is a twelve month subscription to the ‘A Year in Books’ service, and third is a subscription for a new book every other month for a year.
According to the Heywood Hill website, some big names in modern British fiction have already entered the competition. Kazuo Ishiguro, author of ‘The Remains of the Day’ and ‘Never Let Me Go’, has plumped for ‘The Devils’ by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, calling ‘every character bonkers’. Julian Barnes has gone for ‘The Beginning of the Spring’ by Penelope Fitzgerald and Donna Leon ‘A Suitable Boy’ by Vikram Seth. The scope for nominations is pretty massive, as Ishiguro’s nomination shows – originally written in Russian, as long as the book has been published in English, it is fair game. I myself opted for ‘The Once and Future King’ by T.H White and basically wrote them a novella about why I love that book so much. So the only question is, what book are you going to put forwards? Have fun with it but take your time – you have until the 31st October to enter.
Some of the coverage you find on Cultured Vultures contains affiliate links, which provide us with small commissions based on purchases made from visiting our site. We cover gaming news, movie reviews, wrestling and much more.
