The History of the Adventure Writers Competition
by Kerry Frey – – – The Adventure Writer’s Competition started as a short-story competition on the old Simon & Schuster Forum for Clive Cussler fans. The competition entry had to include an original story and characters. It could not contain any references to Clive Cussler characters or storylines. In 2004, Kerry Frey won the first competition with his short story Power Fade starring his hero, Ace Roberts. There was no monetary or literary recognition for the award, but it did allow fans of Cussler who had aspirations to write to be seen by the thousands who frequented the popular forum. From that original competition, Frey and members of the forum expanded the format to include Novel Length & Short-Story categories and named the competition The Literary Idol Competition. The competition spanned two years, with winners announced in 2005 (Michael Shriver) and 2006 (Pete Ragan). Again, no monetary or literary recognition was awarded, but the popularity of the competition grew, as did the number of fans who followed it.
In 2007, the Clive Cussler Collector’s Society approached Frey to take the competition to the next level by renaming the contest “The Adventure Writer’s Competition” sponsored by the Clive Cussler Collector’s Society, adding a one thousand dollar monetary award, and assuring that the winner’s manuscript would be viewed by a literary agent. Frey ran the competition for seven years. Judges have included New York Times Bestselling authors, prior winners, and members of the Clive Cussler Collector’s Society. Since the inception of The Adventure Writer’s Competition, the winners have sold over six hundred thousand books worldwide, quite an accomplishment for a little competition that started off by a few fans of the old Grandmaster of Adventure – Clive Cussler.
In October 2014, Frey handed the reins of the competition over to 2012 Grandmaster winner Peter Greene. In 2021, Eve Simpson, a finalist in 2016 joined as Submission Director, managing between 50 and 100 entries per year. Our judges Panel has the opportunity to read all entries, at least in part. That makes us unique: if one judge doesn’t feel an entry should move on to a higher round, the other dozen or so may score it to move to the next round. Dirk Cussler, the New York Times Best-selling author, is our finalist judge and pick the winner from the top three entries (as chosen by our first and second round judges.
The competition still focuses on adventure writing, the AWC is recognized as possibly the only pure adventure writing competition available to writers today. It is open to new novelists and professionals, though entries must have sold or given away a limited number of copies. Our goal is to help writers get some recognition, meet some people, and get some feedback. The Adventure Writers Competition is not for any kind of profit, except that we fell good helping writers get some recognition. All entry fees go to buying award trophies for the finalists and winner, and for advertising the contest. The enhancements you see today will hopefully entice writers worldwide to enter future competitions with the hope to one day become the next Grandmaster of Adventure.
