Entries for the fourth annual Landfall Essay Competition close on 20 June. If you’re up for it, you'd better be quick. Your essay must be 6,000 words long and previously unpublished. It aims to ‘encourage New Zealand writers to think aloud about New Zealand culture’.

Veteran author Vincent O'Sullivan will judge this year's entries. 'The essay is perhaps the most open of any literary form. It has as much freedom or as much constraint as the writer brings to it. The form of every good essay is something evolved on its own terms,' says O'Sullivan.

The winning essay will be published by the Otago University Press in Landfall 208. For further information, contact Amanda Smith at amanda.smith@stonebow.otago.ac.nz or phone 03-479 9094.