Creating Generative Value: The Prize of A Lifetime (Literally!)

Recently an article by Alison Flood was released on The Guardian that revealed the latest and greatest prize of a lifetime...literally! The 'Library of a Lifetime' award "asks readers to nominate the title that means most to them, with a new book to be sent monthly to the winner until they die" (Flood, 2016). A new book. Every Month. Until the day you die. Um, cool?! Check out the rest below...

"Deborah Levy, Graeme Macrae Burnet and Paul Beatty might be competing for the Man Booker prize and a £50,000 cheque if they win next month, but readers around the world are being offered the opportunity to vie for their own literary award – where the winner will “never have to buy a book again”.

Launched on Friday by independent London bookshop Heywood Hill to mark its 80th anniversary, the Library of a Lifetime award will give its winner “one newly published and hand-picked hardback book per month, for life, delivered anywhere in the world”.

To win, readers must nominate the book that has meant the most to them, with the winner chosen at random in a prize draw. The title must have been published in English, or translated into English, after 1936, the year Heywood Hill was founded. The Mayfair shop, which sells a mix of new, old and antiquarian titles, was founded by George Heywood Hill, with the help of the woman who would become his wife, Anne Gathorne-Hardy, on 3 August 1936.

Karin Scherer, senior Heywood Hill bookseller, said that “for the winner it will be an intellectual adventure of a lifetime … Every reader in the world will want to know about this life-changing prize. Whoever wins the first prize will never have to buy a book again. Instead they can look forward to a lifelong relationship with our bookshop and our booksellers.”

Authors including Kazuo Ishiguro, Donna Leon and William Boyd have already put forward their own nominations, with Ishiguro plumping for Dostoevsky’s The Devils, calling “every character bonkers”, Leon for Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy because “it’s wonderfully funny” and Boyd for Nabokov’s Pale Fire, which he said was “unique, mind-boggling, hilarious”.

The prize is inspired by Heywood Hill’s A Year in Books subscription service, which offers users a reading consultation with the shop’s booksellers to determine their interests, and then a new book each month. One customer in Connecticut, said the shop, has received a monthly book from Heywood Hill for the last 40 years.

“Every person is different. Before we start, we will sit down with the prize winner and find out their reading preferences, and any likes and dislikes,” said Scherer.

Second prize will be a one-year subscription to A Year in Books, and third prize a hardback book every other month for a year. Heywood Hill said that once the competition closes on 31 October, it will use the entries to pull together a list of books covering the last 80 years of English-language fiction and nonfiction."

This kind of opportunity is so cool, and incredibly rare, that even award-winning authors like Donna Leon are joining in the fun!! (Which if you ask me is totally cool but kind of unfair, cause, you know, she gets books for free as an author anyway you would think! Give us little guys a chance!) You could imagine how much cheaper your life would get as a bookaholic if you had a brand new read arrive to your doorstep anywhere in the world, every month for the rest of your life. But let's take a step back.

If you're reading this blog then you're either my tutor from when I started it (hello!) or you're a bookworm who needs guidance to feed your ambition (Welcome, bookers, to the endless pit of literature). So you know how it feels to read a new book. A new adventure, a new escape from the real world, even if you finish it in a day. It took you away from the world you live in, any problems you might have, any dramas in your life, and placed you in this story where the guy get's the girl, the family loves the child, and the winner takes all. Sometimes. But that feeling is so good, right? And let's face it, I'll bet 80% of you have a roof over your head and food on your dinner table, whether you decide to embrace the warmth and eat the meal or not. So the world you're escaping isn't much to need to escape from.

So think about this.

What do you think this opportunity could do for someone who doesn’t have a permanent roof over his or her head? Who has to rely on out of date potato and beans that have been donated? Who sleeps with 10 other people in the room and 4 other people in the bed? What could a book - a way of escaping the world you live in – do for someone who is only just hanging on to life in a shelter? I would love to see this opportunity present itself to them.