T Paulo Urcanse was a Portuguese writer and activist, most famous for his short novel The Pucker Fish, which won him the acclaim of egghead academic types and ruff and tumble dropout members of the urban intelligentsia secretly living off the generational wealth of their parents but dressed in the uniform of a late 19th Century cobbler and/or coal miner.

In a 1997 interview with the popular American television host, Montel Williams, T Paulo Urcanse said (via translator), “The point of writing is not free expression, or thought analysis through careful cataloging of tangential subject matter, but rather that one day, and God may it be soon, you write a bestseller and make lots and lots of money.”

Over the course of his lifetime, T Paulo submitted his short fiction and poems to over 187 contests, with submission fees totaling in the quadruple digits, US$. Unfortunately, he never won. Not once.

A couple of years ago, The Editors of High Horse began the process of rectifying the great financial injustices rendered upon T Paulo by global markets and sports fans and viewers of The Bachelorette everywhere, by announcing the First Annual T Paulo Urcanse Prize For Literary Excellence, giving away $500 in prize money to five very talented writers. In the process, we were fortunate enough to read through over 300 submissions from people no doubt as incredulous as we are about the lack of public acknowledgement by the academy for the utter genius that was T Paulo Urcanse’s writing.