The writers appearing at our fifth anniversary celebration

Our fifth anniversary celebration take place on the 7^th March at the Norwich Arts Centre. There will be music and comedy, the launch of our  anthology Words And Women:Three all in support of future Words And Women projects and the charity Women for Refugee Women. Tickets cost £5 and are available from NAC. There is also a free book event called Books Talk Back in the bar on the same evening, starting at 6pm.

The writers reading on the night include Sarah Evans, the winner of our prose competition, and five of the highly commended whose names and biographies can be found below. Their work is included in our anthology, published by Unthank Books.  Emma Healey, the author of the best-selling novel Elisabeth Is Missing, and guest judge of the competition will introduce the readings.

Sarah Evans

Sarah Evans has had over a hundred stories published in anthologies, magazines and online, with outlets including: the Bridport Prize, Unthank Books, Lighthouse, Structo and Best New Writing. She has won a number of short story prizes, including the Winston Fletcher Prize, the Stratford Literary Festival Prize, the Glass Woman Prize, the Fylde Writers’ Circle Prize and the Rubery Prize. She has also had work performed in London, Hong Kong and New York.

Victoria Hattersley lives in Norwich, works in publishing and has a six year-old daughter. She began writing in 2013 and has had stories published in Unthology 6 by Unthank Books (Norwich) and Before Passing by Great Weather for MEDIA (New York). In addition to writing short stories, she is currently working on her first novel, The Lantern Man.

Isabelle King is an actress, writer and producer. She’s the founder of Books Talk Back; literary events which support and showcase new writing talent. Isabelle's writing has been short-listed for the Ideas/Writers' Centre Norwich national fiction competition and she won an arts journalism competition to be the Embedded Writer at the Family Arts Conference 2015. Isabelle has written a children's book of short stories and frequently reads them at family events throughout Norfolk. 

Margaret Meyer is a writer, therapeutic counsellor and bibliotherapist. She has worked in schools, museums, and is currently a reader-in-residence in the prison service. Before training in psychology she was a fiction editor with Hodder & Stoughton NZ, publisher for the Museum of London, and director of literature for the British Council, promoting UK writers around the world.  A former journalist, Margaret’s non-fiction has been widely published. Her latest, an essay on ‘not knowing’, is included in the forthcoming The Wisdom of Not Knowing, published by Triarchy Press.

Dani Redd

Glenys Newton gave up her job as a social worker to study storytelling. She won the internationally acclaimed Moth True Stories Told Live in 2014 and appeared on Radio 4 in 2015 to talk about storytelling. More recently, Glenys has become involved in volunteering with refugees as the ever increasing humanitarian crisis spreads through the lands. Glenys will be touring with a performance of refugee stories throughout 2016.

Dani Redd is in her second year of a PhD in creative and critical writing at the University of East Anglia. She has recently completed a draft of her first novel, Vore, a darkly comic dystopia, and is currently halfway through a second, Bodeg, which is set on a fictional island in the Arctic Circle.

Please join us for what promises to be a great night. We’ll post more info about the other performers in the next few days, plus details about BooksTalkBack. In the meantime take a look at our dedicated blog page IWD16 for further details.