The Spectator’s Shiva Naipaul prize for outstanding travel writing is open for entries

The Spectator, as it does every year, is offering you good money to write about your travels. What’s more, our £2,000 Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize — named after the late Trinidad-born writer and brother of VS Naipaul — is not awarded for travel writing in the conventional sense. You need not have gone anywhere highly exotic or far away: the prize is for ‘the most acute and profound observation of a culture alien to the writer.’

You can write from outer space or from your back garden, what we’re looking for is writing that is fresh, current, different, intelligent, incisive, witty, sad or funny — or all of those things. Besides the cash prize, the winner will also get his or her entry published in The Spectator. Our judges this year include travel writers Robert Macfarlane, author of The Wild Places and The Old Ways, and Miranda France.

The Shiva Naipaul prize is open to everyone across the globe.