How To Win A Book Per Month For Life

If you love reading, listen up: this is the sole most important competition of your life. Heywood Hill, one of London's oldest bookshops, just announced the Library of a Lifetime prize — and it's the most incredible thing you've ever heard. If you follow these simple instructions, you have a chance of winning a newly-released hardback every month for the rest of your life. Like, until you die. Is anyone else screaming with excitement right now?

To win a book per month for the rest of your life, the first thing you have to do is think of your favorite book. It has to be English-language, and it has to have been published since 1936 — which is the year the Heywood Hill bookshop was established. Then just write a quick statement about why you love that book so much, and you're good to go. If you're lucky, you'll win the most amazing prize that's ever existed since time began: a consultation with a personal bookseller to tell them all about your reading tastes, and then a lifetime supply of brand new books.

But even if you don't win the Library of a Lifetime, there are still some pretty amazing prizes up for grabs. Second prize is a very cool book subscription service that gets you a personally-chosen hardback every month for a year, and third prize gets you a new book every other month for a year. It's not quite the same as the lifetime supply, but it still sounds pretty great to me.

Even if you don't win a prize, entering the competition will still have been the start of something awesome. All of the submissions will be turned into a crowd-sourced catalogue of book recommendations covering the last 80 years of beloved literature — so you'll be recommending your favorite book to someone who might love it just as much as you did. Even popular authors have submitted their own nominations: Kazuo Ishiguro picked The Devils by Fyodor Dostoyevsky because "every character [is] bonkers," and William Boyd chose Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov, which he described as "unique, mind-boggling [and] hilarious."

Readers from around the world can enter, so there is nothing holding you back from winning a book per month for life, and building the greatest library you ever dreamed of.

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