Happy New Year to all our supporters.
We open this year with news of our prose competition.
On Monday 8th January we will announce
the winner of our 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.
The winners will have been selected by our guest judges Emily Midorikawa and Emma Claire Sweeney, authors of A Secret Sisterhood: The hidden friendships of Austen, Brontë, Eliot and Woolf.
Meanwhile we thought we’d continue our tradition of
announcing our Top 40 here first. Congratulations to all of you who made it to
this stage!
And very many thanks to all of you who entered. We had over
350 entries from all over the UK and Ireland, from Dublin, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Leicester,
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 work
in praise of the natural world (from Barn Owls to soil!), from writers and
writing to film-makers and performers, from trafficked women to abandoned
children, from drownings and rescues to grief. There were gently humourous
pieces about relationships and more acerbic, surreal pieces too. The work which
made its way into our Top 40 successfully explores the unusual or the familiar
in an unfamiliar way. We were drawn to interesting content, developed argument
and narrative. We liked language that
conjured an atmosphere. We liked neat structures and experimental structures.
Mostly we chose work which displays confidence and energy, commitment and a
real understanding of form.
Our Top 40:
Each
of Us Drowning at Sea - Fiction - Yvonne
Battle-Felton
Si’s Chair – Fiction -
Debbie Bayne
Where
were you? – Non-fiction - Bibi Berki
End of Term – Fiction - Pippa Brush Chappell
And
We Grew So Old – Fiction - Selma Carvalho
From
the Soil – Non-fiction - Lucy Cash
Glasshouse
– Fiction - Philipa
Coughlan
Havoc Shore – Fiction – Maureen Cullen
Getting Shit On – Non-fiction - Niamh Curran
The Story Of The Good Little Girl Who Did Not Prosper – Fiction - M. J. Doyle
The Gift – Fiction - Jennie Ensor
Every
Living Thing – Non-fiction - Sally Kerry Fox
Molly Lovelace – Fiction - Ledlowe Guthrie
The
Sunbathers –
Fiction – Kerry Hood
Absinthe – Fiction -
Janet Howcroft
The Other Side – Fiction -
Hedy Howe
Paul Newman Eyes – Fiction –
Kate Jefford
That Something of
Me - Non-fiction
- Ingrid Jendrzejewski
Crane – Fiction - Avril Joy
Sebald and standing in the kitchen at a party – Non-fiction
- Alice Kent
Life Buoy – Non-fiction - Kate Malcolm
The Going Nowhere Roads – Fiction - Maire
Malone
F’s
Fir Fingers – Fiction - Margot McCuaig
Four Days of Dying – Non-fiction - Kirstin McKie
The Once and Only First Lady Judge – Fiction - Margaret Meyer
Upon Return – Fiction - Carmen Morawski
Dress
rehearsal – Fiction - Hannah Persaud
Age
of Reason – Fiction - Anne Rabbitt
Loving
Icarus – Fiction - Alex Reece Abbott
The
Man Who Walked In Off The Street – Fiction - Rashmee Roshan Lall
We Begin In Many Ways - Non-fiction -
Christina Sanders
Kindred
Spirits – Non-fiction - Helen Stockton
Black Boy Winnings – Fiction -
Janet H Swinney
Waiting Rooms – Non-fiction -
Shelley Tracey
It
Never Rains in Wycombe – Non-fiction
- Jennifer
Twomey
She Clown – Fiction - Hannah Vincent
The
Anthropologist’s Feet – Fiction - Dominie Walters
In
the Moment – Fiction - Clare Weze
Borrowed
– Fiction - Melanie Whipman
The
Little Detective - Fiction - Julia Wills
.
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