That’s it – time’s up. The competition for this year’s Best of Manchester Awards closed at Midnight on Monday. All that art, imagery, music, composition, photography, design and fashion is now winging its way to the judges. They’ll take a broad look at the entries prior to the judging sessions at Urbis next week and we have a feeling they’re going to be busy: the number of entries is up by 65% on last year’s competition (phew).
We’ve had a sneaky peek at what’s been entered and, to be honest, we’re pretty impressed by what we’ve seen. What we’ve ended up with is a very mixed bag, but in the best possible way. In music, for example, there’s everything from contemporary classical composition to hip-hop, jazz, heavy metal – and a fair few entries that defy categorisation. There are plenty of intelligent, clever, innovative and witty entries, and, it has to be said, a couple of downright hilarious ones (we’re assuming that’s intentional…).
And that’s the whole point of the Best of Manchester: it’s all about work that doesn’t fit neatly into boxes (oooh, we almost said ‘work that thinks outside the box’ but that would be a terrible thing to say outside of a corporate team building event). Best of Manchester is a competition that has no rules and regulations. And our judges, who are about to roll their sleeves up and start shortlisting, are only really expecting the unexpected.
