Our prose competition long-list

Naomi Wood

Happy New Year to all our supporters. We open this year with news of our prose competition. Naomi Wood, author of The Godless Boys and the bestseller Mrs. Hemingway and our guest judge, met with us today to discuss the long-list and decide which out of all these scripts are our worthy national and regional winners and which our 20 highly-commended. It was a very interesting, frank and lively discussion but finally there was consensus! All entries were judged anonymously and so it was an exciting moment when we could uncover the names.

On Monday 9^th January we will announce the winner of our new national prize of £1,000 and a month long writing retreat, generously sponsored by Hosking Houses Trust, and the winner of our East of England prize of £600 and a mentoring session with Jill Dawson of Gold Dust.  We will also announce the names of the highly-commended who will be included in our anthology Words and Women: Four, published in partnership with Unthank Books. Meanwhile we thought we’d continue our tradition of publishing our long-list of 40 here on this blog. Congratulations to all of you who made it to this stage!

And very many thanks to all of you who entered. We had 350 entries in total from all over the UK and Ireland, from Dublin, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Nottingham, Bristol, Canterbury, Norwich, Cambridge and many other cities, towns and villages. There was a good strong mix of fiction and non, many interesting essays and strong memoir pieces. Themes explored were as varied, ranging from bear-hunting to dating, immigration to flying, from OCD to embroidery, from terrorism to bereavement, from plastic surgery to nightmare futures. The work which made its way onto our long-list successfully explores the unusual or the familiar in an unfamiliar way. We were drawn to tight, stylish sentences. We liked neat structures and experimental structures. Mostly we chose work which displays confidence and energy, commitment and a real understanding of form.

Our long-list:

Far From Home – Ann Abineri

Leaving The Home That Made me – Jamilah Ahmed

Sunday Tea – Kate Harmond Allan

The Wife – Deborah Arnander

Schokolade – Sarah Bower

Nan & Agatha – Alison Burnside

Pull of Distance – Margaret Callaghan

Pandora – Carole Craig

Future Perfect – Tricia Cresswell

Glory Be – Sara Crowley

A Roll of The Dice – Mona Dash

The Bear – Louise Dumayne

Dear Shadow – Kate Feld

Sorry Business – Lilie Ferrari

Suite for my Father – Melissa Fu

A Tree Full of Ghosts – Pia Ghosh-Roy

The Last Card – Guinevere Glasfurd

Red Sails – Tara Gould

Wedad – Sarah Gowen

Weightlessness  - Sarah Isaac

Thin Air – Ingrid Jendrzejewski

Babies – Sarah Mackey

Rag and Bone – Catherine Menon

A Punch Up At The Wedding – Anna Metcalfe

Thiruvega – Clare Morgan

There’s a Wee Bomb Upstairs – Helen Morris

The Boy in The Bivouac – Shiona Morton

Dungeness – Lucy Nabijou

The Time of Assassinations – Nasrin Parvaz

Memory Thief – Marianne Picton

Catsick – Sarah Poulton

The Talent Show – Ronne Randall

It’s Not Unusual – Elvire Roberts

Me & My Reptile on a Concrete Reef – Kate Robinson

Private Parts – Cherise Saywell

Beauregard’s Last Walk – Victoria Shropshire

Winter’s Map – Penny Simpson

Lives of The Saints – Ann Kennedy Smith

Some Adjustment Required – Mary White

Two Kinds of Something – Sarah Wickes