The New Media Writing Prize is an annual, juried competition in the United Kingdom awarding prizes to works of innovative digital fiction that uses interactivity, participatory elements and/or multimedia and achieves "good storytelling". Works that are shortlisted for the prize are seen as "cutting edge, exemplar works, which one might suppose demonstrate the best of everything that new-media storytelling can offer", and are archived by the British Library.
History
The New Media Writing Prize was established in 2010 by Bournemouth University. The main prize was renamed the Chris Meade Memorial UK New Media Writing Prize in 2021. As of 2023 there is also a student award, an Opening Up Award, a Digital Journalism Award and an Interactive Digital Narrative for Social Good Award. Some years have also included a People's Choice Award.
Reception
A 2012 article in The Independent described the prize with a mix of sarcasm and appreciation, starting with the tagline "It's writing, Jim, but not as we know it." The article describes the shortlisted works and encourages readers to vote, although its interviews with traditional publishers who assure the reader that it's "still OK to love real books" has been criticised.
Winning and shortlisted works are archived by the British Library, and on establishing the archive, archivists and prize organisers co-authored a paper outlining challenges of archiving interactive, multimodal literary works. Several winning and shortlisted works were showcased in the 2023 British Library exhibition "Digital Storytelling".