A chance to publish in the Mail and Guardian, to receive professional feedback on your writing from media experts and a prize of R8000. Exclusively available to scholars and alumni, this competition seeks an essay of not more than 1500 words that showcases thought leadership and opinion on a topic relevant to the development of this region and close to your heart.
For any question regarding the Essay Competition, please email Catherine on catherine@canoncollins.org. We look forward to your amazing and thought provoking essays in 2025.
Essay Criteria
The winning essays demonstrate thought leadership, showing a grasp of the subject and its most recent discoveries and developments. It needs to show relevance by being applied to a situation in any part of southern Africa. It needs to reveal something – whether it is a new insight, a new approach to analysis that brings new light to a subject, an unexplored topic, or an unreported incident that is noteworthy and that the public deserve to be made aware off.
We would suggest your tone is friendly rather than formal. What the M&G like to say is imagine you are explaining this to a friend.
Some guidelines:
- The work must be exclusive and not published elsewhere;
- Please keep your article to between 1000 and 1500 words (exceptions can be made if justified);
- No footnotes. Please use hyperlinks to articles/evidence that back up statements made;
- Please don’t use capital letters except where they are necessary (proper nouns and the beginning of sentences);
- Please write out acronyms in full the first time they are used;
- No bigotry will be tolerated; and
- Please remember that this is an opinion and not an advertisement of a company or product. It is also not a thesis, so please bear in mind our readers when using academic language.
As we do not have time to edit your work please make sure that your essay is proofread and clean of any grammar and punctuation errors.
