The Anaïs Nin Foundation and Nexus: The International Henry Miller Journal are pleased to announce the inaugural Anaïs Nin Essay Prize. We are seeking submissions of scholarly essays centered on the work, influence, relationships, or legacy of Anaïs Nin. Essays should aim to extend the academic conversation around her contributions to literature, art, and culture.

Poetry is the translator and the output. It is the heart of the matter. It is the unsaid things in written form.

Ammoniac is a wonderfully written book. There is no fancy writing here just a gritty, raw and uncensored version of our protagonist. Its dystopian tone rides nicely along with this marriage of humour and darkness. To add to this, it feels unequivocally British - the lingo, the language. I do not feel so far away from knowing someone like him, its familiarity is weirdly comforting.

Henry Miller described George Turner as one of ‘the hundred or so’ of Anaïs Nin’s lovers he never got to meet.  He was an American business acquaintance of her husband Hugh Guiler who was infatuated with her.  They first met in the late 1920s when they danced together and she was charmed by him.

Poetry always came first - then fiction. Bukowski was the lynch pin that allowed me to link these up using a free flowing conversational style, a style I never knew existed - a style I would use for the rest of my life. It also linked up my two loves – the spirit of rock and roll and literature.

I stare at the blank page, the blank digital page on my laptop and feel its threatening white glow upon my skin. I sit with my notebook and feel nothing but an invite to fill its pages. I am uninterrupted by AI help, suggestions for corrections and the pinging of emails and new alerts. Even the whirring of my laptop annoys me.

Whether we call them our muse or the inspiration behind the creative endeavours that shape our lives, in her feminine power, I find a mother. I discover a blend of the empress and the high priestess tarot cards, beautifully rolled into one figure…

Poetry grounds me. It is an escape as much as a mirror of my thoughts and feelings, positive or negative. It helped me grow; it allows me to heal. Poetry is the lens I need to try to make sense of it all. Or to navigate the uncertainty, to say the least. ..

Creativity in its purest form is the act of invention. From stories to paintings to fashion garments – we are all inventing our own piece of art.  As children we often played with limited props, we used our imagination to re-create the world we saw around us…

When Clarice Lispector sat down to write this book she set out to “capture the present”, a place where she endeavours to capture life and time as she feels it…

Many years ago, I stumbled across a rather interesting looking magazine that was just right up my alley – it was called Morbid Curiosity. It was filled full of essays featuring ghosts, death, cemeteries, mummies, murder, spirits...the list goes on…

I think poetry is or can be a lot of things, but for me, it's always been a doorway. In a sense, it is the threshold between the incarnate and the intangible; it’s how we make material of the occult. A poem can be everything, really—defying and collapsing time and aspects of selves. So, maybe it is a way to express the soul?

On 19th, Nin asks Tana if she could borrow a Spanish dress that she has. They head to the cellar together. She is so excited to be able to able to borrow it that she kisses her lips ‘childishly’ and Tana responds with fervour. As Nin rushes out, Tana encircles her arms around her from behind and they walk out together. When Nin turns her head back, they share another passionate kiss ‘as lovers, violently and wildly.’

This novella is a stylistic trample along the waste land, a pilgrimage that is felt with every word, every sentence, every delicately placed piece of punctuation. It is a death chant, a pilgrimage with unknown lands and consequences.

A tool to heal. A mirror. An edited journal entry. A commentary. A succinct observation about a vast occurrence. God for Dummies.