A video game reviewing publication, poetry machine, and multilingual publication are the three big winners from the inaugural Young Writers Innovation Prize.

Funded by the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund and administered by Express Media, the Young Writers Innovation Prize is a new initiative that aims to unleash the potential of young thinkers. Young writers across Australia are encouraged to develop an innovative project that will improve or contribute to the field of literature and publishing.

Entries were received from all over Australia in the first year of the program, with judges impressed by the quality of submissions received.

This year’s winners of the 2013 Young Writers Innovation Prize are:

First Place ($4,000 cash prize): Daniel Golding – Press Select

Press Select is a small digital publishing company specialising in videogame criticism, founded by Daniel Golding and Brendan Keogh. Press Select will digitally publish mature, long-form, critical e-books that allow authors to approach a single videogame or series with significant depth and critical consideration. Press Select will work with professional editors and designers to create a highly professional and marketable product to be read by young people, written by young people, and to foster critical engagement with this emerging art

Second Place ($1,000 cash prize): Oscar Schwartz –The Poetry Machine

A poetry competition between human poets and computer poets built by programmers, and, in the process, to see if it is possible to program a computer to make poetry that is indistinguishable from poetry written by a person. The Poetry Machine will provide a new way of looking at what it is that makes poetry a human activity, and whether the intelligence we use to make poetry is reproducible in computers. The project will inevitably lead to a dialogue between programmers and poets.

Third Place ($500 cash prize): Raelke Grimmer – Tongues  

Tongues will be an online publication publishing short articles (300 to 500 words) about culture, language, travel, health and wellbeing and reviews of books and music, publishing content in as many languages as possible. Tongues will create content in different languages to provide writers in all languages with a platform for their work, and to provide language learners with authentic texts through which to gain exposure to the languages they are learning.

The publication will also accept quality short stories between 1,000 and 3,000 words, for publication as an e-book and audio-book package, to be sold through the website as additional resources for both language learners and those wishing to access short fiction in a variety of languages.

Congratulations to these talented, young winners on their inspiring proposals!

For more information on the Young Writers Innovation Prize, including media requests, please contact Creative Producer Lefa Singleton Norton at creativeproducer@expressmedia.org.au.