Alita Balbi

This year for the first time a slice of Words And Women will go on tour as part of the Breckland Book Festival ( http://brecklandbookfestival.com). Some of our writers and performers will be visiting Watton Library on the 16^th March 2013, 12.00 – 1.00pm, and Thetford Library on the 23^rd March 2013, 12.00 – 1.00pm.

Alita Balbi is a newcomer to Words And Women and will be reading her work at the Watton event. Alita was born in a small town in Brazil, and writes fiction both in English and Portuguese. She is currently a MA student on the Creative Writing Prose course at UEA.

Sarah Ridgard

Sarah is another wonderful writer who will be reading her work in the Fusion Digital Gallery during our evening celebrations on the 8^th March. 

Sarah is a graduate of the MA in Creative Writing at UEA (2002), and was selected as one of ten writers from the East of England for the Escalator Scheme run by the Norwich Writer’s Centre. This was in 2009. Then in August 2012 Sarah’s debut novel, Seldom Seen, was published by

Random House and subsequently shortlisted for the Amazon Rising Stars Competition. 

Catherine Taylor – The Guardian – described the novel as “Death and mayhem in sleepy rural Suffolk… Ridgard's evocation of landscape, of farming, its seasons, cruelties and epiphanies, is striking...”

Sarah lives in Norwich with her husband and two children.

Deborah Arnander

Deborah, who will be reading her work during our evening celebrations in the Fusion Digital Gallery, was born in Northumberland and spent her childhood in Thailand.  She studied at the University of Sussex and has a PhD in French literature.  After leaving university she lived in Paris, San Francisco and Seville, and worked as a translator, researcher, speechwriter, house doctor, market trader, bingo-hall caller and bartender.  She was lured to Norwich by the siren on the ziggurat – she spent four years doing various courses in UEA’s continuing education creative writing programme – and her two young daughters were born here.  In 2009 she won an Escalator New Writing Award.

She has a short story in Unthank Books’ first Unthology, and has published poems on the webzine Ink, Sweat and Tears, and in the anthologies Not Expecting Fish, Gatehouse Press, and Voicing Visions, (Norwich Twenty Group Spring Exhibition 2009).  She is currently working on her first novel, about a G.I. baby, set in wartime Norwich and 90s California.

Eleanor Wasserberg

Eleanor will be reading her work as part of the evening celebrations in the Fusion Digital Gallery. She was born in Staffordshire, and  has a BA in Classics and English from the University of Oxford, and has worked as an english teacher in Paris and Trivandrum. In 2010, she graduated from the Creative Writing MA at the University of East Anglia, and Arts Council England recently awarded her a grant to complete her first novel Foxlowe. Foxlowe  follows a cult survivor as she remembers a childhood both hedonistic and chaotic, violent and magical. Set in the Staffordshire Moorlands, Foxlowe draws upon pagan sites and local folklore to tell a story of love and power, shame and redemption.

Heidi Williamson

Heidi is currently poet-in-residence at the John Jarrold Printing Museum in Norwich, and will be reading her work at Words And Women during the evening celebrations in the Fusion Digital Gallery. Heidi’s first collection,  ‘Electric Shadow’ (Bloodaxe Books, 2011), was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and was shortlisted for the 2012 Seamus Heaney Centre
Prize for Poetry. She has lived in Stirling, Brussels and Norfolk, and was poet-in-residence at the London Science Museum’s
Dana Centre in 2008 and 2009. More about Heidi and her work can be found at www.heidiwilliamsonpoet.com .