William Max Nelson - Five Ways of Being a Painting and Other Essays: The Winners of the Third Notting Hill Editions Essay Prize

I take the essay to be an artful recreation of thought and feeling. At its best, the essay explores the tension between the familiar and the unfamiliar, allowing the reader to experience the feeling of ideas in motion. William Max Nelson

An essay is a short work of non-fiction prose that is far reaching, yet highly individual; discursive, yet lapidary; capacious, yet pithy. The best examples of the form come off like rodeo stunts, pulling seemingly random observations into a noose, lassoing insights that would otherwise have galloped away. Laura Esther Wolfson

Just as the arsonist, the curiosity-seeker, and the firefighter can be present at the same fire, an essay can perform any or all of their functions in relation to its subject: igniting, bearing witness, struggling to solve. At its best, however, an essay is the householders escape route from his own burning house or her perilous return for those valuables she cannot bear to leave behind. Garret Keizer

To me, essay means being present in thought. Dasha Shkurpela

What is an essay? This is perhaps one of those Delphian questions that everyone can only sort of answer. Many definitions exist, of course. A trial from the Old French essai, which has been in circulation for centuries; a proofe experiment says Montaigne, purveyor extraordinaire of the form; a literary form expressing an original and universal idea in a language common to us all, claims Tom Kremer, the founder of the Notting Hill Editions Essay Prize. But much of the modern essays appeal, no doubt, is down to its intrinsic fluidity within a somewhat rigid framework. It is not memoir, reportage or opinion per se, though often contains elements of those genres. It is categorically not poetry or fiction. Regardless of what the essay is, what it must do is persuade, and that is precisely what each of the five runners-up and the one final winner of this years prize did.

Joining me as judges were author, broadcaster and cultural commentator Travis Elborough; novelist and critic Kirsty Gunn; editor, critic and essayist Sameer Rahim; and author, critic and essayist Daniel Mendelsohn. More than five hundred submissions were whittled down for us by a team of early readers (thank you, readers!) to a manageable seventy-seven, from which we selected a shortlist of twelve followed by five finalists and one winner. It was a highly harmonious and thought-provoking discussion, but there were disagreements. For what is an essay?

Some of us felt it was an argument put forth and proven, or at least that a viable attempt to prove an argument had to be evident. Others saw it as more of an investigation, with little or no need for teleology. The writing had to matter, as did style, tone and purpose. The subject did not.

What was obvious, though, was that no matter how much each of us clung to our particular set of criteria, we could always think of examples which were exceptional to the very principles we were clinging to, and this helpfully informed our conversation about the essays in front of us, which we judged according to their own merits rather than by a set of arbitrary guidelines.

In My Head I Carry My Own Zoo by Karen Holmberg is an expansive consideration of the work of British collagist John Digby. Its a testament to Holmbergs writing that I quickly went away and Googled Digby, taken by her descriptions of his art, which is no mean feat, but also the elusive portrait that she presents of Digby by weaving together her observations of him with his own words.

Grub: A Man in the Market by Garret Keizer is a personal essay about doing the weekly food shop. But of course the essay isnt about that at all. Deceptively simple in its methods, Keizer takes this quotidian chore and uses it as a platform to discuss all manner of things: capitalism, marriage and modernity, to name only three. Affectionate yet authoritative, this essay brilliantly captures the many moods of the form itself.

In The Future of Nostalgia: Orhan Pamuk and the Real Imaginary Museum, Patrick McGuiness argues for the importance (and the usefulness) of nostalgia which, along with melancholy, morbidity and introspection (nostalgias bandmates) gets a bad rap for being solipsistic. But McGuiness, by way of Orhan Pamuk, shows us how a longing for the personal past can give us a stronger perspective on a communal future.

Most of us didnt know anything about commonplace dachas in Russia until we read Dacha by Dasha Shkurpela. With its uncertain meandering through the meanings of temporary and permanent summerhouses in the Russian countryside its questioning and hesitating this essay threw up strange and surprising links between trains of thought.

As did Losing the Nobel by Laura Esther Wolfson, another unapologetically personal essay which touches effortlessly on the mirage of regret without any hint of self-pity. Its also a wonderful introduction to the work of Svetlana Alexievich, whose work I would urge anyone to read, and a superb meditation on translation and interpretation, and the nuanced differences between them.

Five Ways of Being a Painting by William Max Nelson was ultimately named our winning entry, and deservedly so. It is a curious mix of the philosophical and the personal, the argumentative and the ruminative, with each of its many modes mutually illuminating the others.

It feels larger than itself, argued one of the judges. It is idiosyncratic in a persuasive way, remarked another. The deft blending together of the strands of Europe and China, past and present, hiding and seeing; the delicate but forceful episodic style; the intellectual reach this, we concluded, was a real essay.

Five ways of being a painting. Only two of them common.

Reflecting on his childhood in Berlin at the turn of the century, Walter Benjamin wrote that he feared being exiled in things. He often felt trapped in objects that absorbed his being. No longer a boy, he was blue and white Chinese porcelain, the bright pigments of a watercolor set, a fluttering white curtain, or a soap bubble floating through a room. Repeatedly, he lost himself.

Benjamin did not only get enveloped in matter and trapped in objects. When looking at photographs and paintings, he often found himself displaced into the picture.

Being a painting can make you strange, to yourself and to others. It has long been a means of exploring who we are and how we differ. Being a painting gives you an existence in both the inverted world and the familiar one. It displaces you through alienation and renewed attention.

It can be used to reveal one person from another, one culture from another. But it also has other functions that draw on the almost occult power of what Benjamin called opaque resemblance.

At dusk on the dock in La Rochelle, two objects draw me in. A stack of lumber and a pile of goods unloaded from an absent ship.

Men are cutting rough planks out of tree trunks. They stack the planks in a large square pattern that reaches twice their own height. On every other level of the stack, one plank protrudes. Together these protruding ends make a stairway spiraling around the pile, allowing the men to place a portable metal roof on top each night.