The Michael O’Pray Prize is an award for new writing on innovation and experimentation in the moving image. 

  
The prize is open to all early-career writers based in the UK and is free to apply to. Applicants are invited to send a proposal or pitch for a new text, alongside an example of previous writing.

  
**About the Prize**

  
The Prize is named in memory of the critic, historian and film programmer, Michael O’Pray. The guiding presence behind Film and Video Umbrella in its early years (1985-1990), Mike was the first Director of Film and Video Umbrella, and was a regular contributor to the pages of Art Monthly. Over the course of his long and varied career, Mike was an impassioned and energetic champion of avant-garde cinema, highlighting the continuing influence of key figures from the past, while dynamically promoting contemporary talents in experimental film and video. In his writings, and in the many programmes he curated for Film and Video Umbrella and elsewhere, Mike always endeavoured to make radical, challenging, occasionally esoteric work accessible to a wider public – and it is with this in mind that the award seeks to encourage examples of imaginative, engaging writing that extols and advances this longstanding tradition of experimentation in film and video for a non-specialist audience. One of the aims of the prize is that the platform it offers helps writers to receive future writing commissions. Previous winners have gone on to contribute new articles for Art Monthly and other publications.

Three of the applicants will be selected to realise the proposed text. There will be a £750 prize for the winner, with £350 each for two further awardees. All three awarded texts will be published by Art Monthly and FVU.

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