Rosalind Porter – Foreword – 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 essay’s 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 year’s 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, vii