Berggruen Prize Essay Competition

The annual Berggruen Prize Essay Competition seeks to stimulate new thinking and innovative concepts while embracing cross-cultural perspectives across fields, disciplines, and geographies. By posing fundamental philosophical questions of significance for both contemporary life and for the future, the competition will serve as a complement to the Berggruen Prize for Philosophy & Culture, which recognizes major lifetime achievements in advancing ideas that have shaped the world.

The competition awards a prize of $50,000 USD for essays submitted in English and $50,000 USD for essays submitted in Chinese. An award ceremony will be hosted, and the winning essays will be published to give readers insight into perspectives of both East and West.

The organizer invites essays that follow in the tradition of renowned thinkers such as Rousseau, Michel de Montaigne, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Submissions should present novel ideas and be clearly argued in compelling ways for intellectually serious readers.

The theme for 2025 is ‘Consciousness‘:

• Origin of consciousness
• Materiality of consciousness
• Emergence of consciousness
• Non-human consciousness (including machines)
• Manifestation of consciousness
• Threshold of consciousness
• Consciousness in relation to life
• Experience of consciousness
• Evolution of consciousness
• Consciousness across cosmologies

Submissions must be original content that has not been published in any form or in any publication.

Each language category will have a prize of $50,000 USD. If there is more than one winner in any given year, the amount will be distributed evenly among the winners.