Verner and Gillian Bickley aren't your average emeritus academics. Sharp and full of energy, they act more like start-up entrepreneurs. The couple run a small publishing house from their Discovery Bay home - Proverse Publishing, which releases about 10 books annually - and now sponsor an international prize for unpublished literature.
The idea for the Proverse Prize came up a couple of years ago as the husband-and-wife team were discussing literary prizes over breakfast one morning.
'As writers ourselves, we'd try to enter prizes,' says Gillian Bickley. 'You read all the instructions and are about to enter when you come to that one point that disqualifies you. It could be anything - age, prior publication, residency, nationality. And so, we thought it would be a really good service to have a prize where there were no regulations whatsoever. Our only stipulation is entrants must be over 18.'
A former English literature lecturer at the Baptist University, Gillian set up Proverse with her husband in 2002 after self-publishing a book about education. The name, an amalgamation of 'prose' and 'verse', reflects the range of their catalogue.
Losing no time, the Bickleys drafted the rules, set aside money for the prize, spread the news through personal networks and their website, then waited for the first batch of entries.
'The response was surprisingly good and the standard very high,' says Verner Bickley, a former assistant director of education. Entries have come from Andorra, Australia, the Bahamas, Bangladesh, Britain, Hong Kong, Mauritius, New Zealand and the United States. They've received novels, short stories, poetry, non-fiction and, this year, an epic.