“A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language”. W.H. Auden
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Five Bursaries Polly Crosby was runner-up in the Peggy Chapman-Andrews Award in 2018. Her winning novel, ‘The Illustrated Child’ will be published by HarperCollins HQ in 2020, and by Park Row Books in the USA the same year. Polly, who has cystic fibrosis, is generously funding five bursaries to enable disabled writers or writers living with a long-term or debilitating illness to submit their novels to the 2019 PC-A competition free of charge. One bursary each will be offered to a writer living in Scotland, Wales, England, N Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. For full details of how to apply, please see the T&C’s.
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“A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language”. W.H. Auden
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“A short story must have a single mood and every sentence must build towards it.” Edgar Allan Poe
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“There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be.” Doris Lessing
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“Receiving a telephone call out of the blue to be told that I had come third in the Bridport Prize was a heart stopping, mouth stopping moment that took more than the rest of the day to sink in, knowing how significant in a writer’s world, this prize has become”.
Naomi Wood is the author of The Godless Boys (Picador, 2011) and the award-winning Mrs. Hemingway (Picador, 2014) which won the British Library Writers Award, the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Award, was shortlisted for the International Dylan Thomas Award, and was a Richard and Judy book-club choice. Her third novel, The Hiding Game, is set in the Bauhaus art school in1920s Germany, and will be published in the Bauhaus centenary year by Picador in 2019. Her work is available in sixteen languages. She teaches at UEA and lives in Norwich with her family.
"I'm looking for a first novel that will keep me guessing, that will deliver tension in the story and pleasure in the sentences. Debuts in particular depend on voice: I'd love that voice to be fresh and different and unfamiliar.”
Website - www.naomiwood.com
Facebook - @NaomiWoodBooks
Twitter - @NaomiWoodBooks
Instagram @naomiwoodbooks
Pinterest @NaomiWoodBooks
Image: Rachel Hippolyte
Hollie McNish is a full time writer who loves writing poetry. She has published three poetry collections Papers, Cherry Pie and Plum, and one poetic memoir on politics and parenthood, Nobody Told Me, of which the Scotsman suggested “The world needs this book” and for which she won the Ted Hughes Award. In 2017 Nobody Told Me was translated into German, French and Spanish and released in the USA.
In 2016 she co-wrote a play Offside with Sabrina Mahfouz, relating the two hundred year history of UK women’s football.
She has written a few select commissions including subjects such as: orgasm inequality for Durex; various for The Economist Education Foundation and most recently 'War Whores' – a history of sex work in World War One for the 14-18 / Roundhouse LDN partnership.
Hollie tours continuously all over the UK, Europe and beyond and is a big fan of freely accessible online readings – her poetry videos have attracted millions of views worldwide.
She is currently working on a new collection of poems and stories.
"I’m looking for poetry that interests, perhaps surprises, tickles or pulls me in upon first reading, but which also stands up proud to repeated re-reads. I’m searching for distinctive voices that leave me wanting to read more from this same mind, voice, pen. I’d love to feel from the poems; what feeling that is, I don’t know yet!"
Website - www.holliepoetry.com
Facebook - @holliepoetry
Twitter - @holliepoetry
YouTube - holliepoetry
Instagram - @holliepoetry
Image: Kat Gollock
Kirsty Logan is the author of the novels The Gloaming and The Gracekeepers, short story collections A Portable Shelter and The Rental Heart & Other Fairytales, flash fiction chapbook The Psychology of Animals Swallowed Alive, and short memoir The Old Asylum in the Woods at the Edge of the Town Where I Grew Up. Her books won the Lambda Literary Award, Polari Prize, Saboteur Award, Scott Prize and Gavin Wallace Fellowship. Her work has been translated into Japanese and Spanish, recorded for radio and podcasts, exhibited in galleries and distributed from a vintage Wurlitzer cigarette machine. She lives in Glasgow with her wife.
“ I'm hoping to find something surprising, vivid, and emotionally real. Most of all, I'm looking for something with a unique voice and viewpoint – a story that couldn't have been written by anyone else”.
Image: Simone Falk
Kirsty Logan is the author of the novels The Gloaming and The Gracekeepers, short story collections A Portable Shelter and The Rental Heart & Other Fairytales, flash fiction chapbook The Psychology of Animals Swallowed Alive, and short memoir The Old Asylum in the Woods at the Edge of the Town Where I Grew Up. Her books won the Lambda Literary Award, Polari Prize, Saboteur Award, Scott Prize and Gavin Wallace Fellowship. Her work has been translated into Japanese and Spanish, recorded for radio and podcasts, exhibited in galleries and distributed from a vintage Wurlitzer cigarette machine. She lives in Glasgow with her wife.
"In a story I want something unexpected, something imaginative and honest, something strange and familiar”.
Image: Simone Falk
Editing isn't simply a process of finessing. That is, of course, the final stage, but sometimes what can happen, especially in the context of writing competitions, is that a line-by-line perfectly serviceable submission comes in with few to no grammatical or syntactical errors - but it still lacks that special something that makes one take notice.
Being invited to hear someone’s revelations or considered reflections is always a moment of great privilege and responsibility.
For someone who is about to embark on a career as a novelist, I’m not very good with words. Don’t get me wrong, I love words. I love the sounds they make, the pictures they conjure in my head.
