The Burlington Contemporary Art Writing Prize
The Burlington Contemporary Art Writing Prize seeks to discover talented writers on contemporary art. The winner of the Prize receives £1,000, their review is published on Burlington Contemporary and they have the opportunity to publish a review of a future contemporary art exhibition in The Burlington Magazine.
Since its foundation in 1903 The Burlington Magazine has considered the art of the present to be as worthy of study as the art of the past. The Burlington Contemporary Art Writing Prize advances our commitment to the study of contemporary art in the Magazine and on Burlington Contemporary. Designed to encourage aspiring writers, the Prize promotes clear, concise and well-structured writing that is able to navigate sophisticated ideas without recourse to over-complex language.
The Burlington Contemporary Art Writing Prize is generously funded by the Thistle Trust.
Submission criteria
To enter the prize, entrants should submit one unpublished review of one contemporary art exhibition by 10am BST on Monday 20th July 2026. Please note that late entries will not be considered.
Entrants must have published no more than six pieces of writing in print or online, in any language or country, prior to their submission. This does not include personal blogs and websites, but does relate to writing of any sort, on any topic, published by a professional outlet (excluding student newspapers).
Before entering, applicants are encouraged to read reviews recently published in Burlington Contemporary.
Writers who have already been published in The Burlington Magazine or Burlington Contemporary are not eligible to enter.
There is no age limit for applicants.
‘Contemporary’ is defined as art produced since 2000.
The exhibition under review can be staged anywhere in the world, but it should be current or have closed within the last six months at the date of submission.
Texts about the applicant’s own work or project will not be accepted. Poems or visual essays will also not be accepted.
The review must be between 800 and 1,000 words in length and accompanied by up to three low-resolution images.
The submitted review must be written in English and emailed as a word document (please do not send a PDF) together with a completed submission form to: burlingtoncontemporary@burlington.org.uk.
Please include your full name in the submitted file names.
The deadline is 10am BST on Monday 20th July 2026.
About the judges
This year’s prize will be judged by the artist Amy Sillman and the art historian Richard Shiff.
Amy Sillman is known for her process-based painting and drawings and an expansive practice that also includes animation, printing, writing, zines, curating and large-scale site-specific projects. She embraces abstraction, language, humour, a rigorous physicality and questions about form, concept and method. Recent solo exhibitions include Alternate Side- Permutations #1-32 at DIA Foundation, Bridgehampton (2025–26), Oh, Clock! at Kunstmuseum Bern (2024–25) and the Ludwig Forum for International Art, Aachen (2024–25). Sillman regularly publishes her writing on art, and her book Faux Pas: Selected Writings and Drawings (2020) is now in its third reprint and has been translated into French. Sillman is represented by David Zwirner and also shows with Thomas Dane, London and Naples, and Capitain Petzel, Berlin.
Richard Shiff is the Effie Marie Cain Regents Chair in Art at The University of Texas at Austin, where he directs the Center for the Study of Modernism. His scholarly interests range broadly across the field of modern and contemporary art and theory. His publications include Cézanne and the End of Impressionism (1984), Critical Terms for Art History (co edited, 1996, 2003), Barnett Newman: A Catalogue Raisonné (co authored, 2004), Doubt (2008), Between Sense and de Kooning (2011), Ellsworth Kelly: New York Drawings 1954–1962 (2014) and Sensuous Thoughts: Essays on the Work of Donald Judd (2020).