Busy!

Jane Harris (c) James Lipman

What are Words And Women upto at the moment? Well…

We have just launched our Friends’ scheme and our special event – Meet the author Jane Harris - which will take place in Norwich on the 29^th November. Jane has written two celebrated novels: Observations and Gillespie And I. In the USA, The Observations won the First Fiction Prize for The Book of the Month Club. This ‘ebullient antidote to all those po-faced historical sagas' (Observer) was short-listed for the UK National Book Awards, The Orange Prize for Fiction and The South Bank Show/Times Breakthrough Award. Gillespie and I was short-listed for the UK National Book Awards and long-listed for The Orange Prize. Daisy Goodwin of the Sunday Times described the book as ‘ a Booker-worthy novel that I want to read again.' See our dedicated blog page ‘Friends’ for details about the scheme, how to join and how to secure your ticket for this fantastic event.

On Monday we began our series of writing workshops for young women at The Hewitt School in Norwich. The workshops follow on from a masterclass in writing which was given by Meg Rosoff at the school in May this year. A lovely, enthusiastic group of girls from Year 7 up to Year 11 met with Words And Women organiser Bel Greenwood to explore the story form, and will continue to meet for another five workshops after half-term. The workshops are supported by a grant from the Co-Op Community Fund.

The mentoring sessions for our winners of About, our commissioning competition supported by Arts Council England, begin on Saturday and our Tough Room Workshop for the commended writers will take place on Monday. We’re all very excited about this project and are looking forward to producing some great writing for performance and the page. Regular updates about About will be posted on this blog.

Finally, a reminder. If you want to win £600 and publication in our second anthology Words and Women: Two then enter our prose competition. Twenty shortlisted entries will also be published in the anthology. It’s a great way to get your writing noticed. A London agent has already signed up last year’s winner Dani Redd. For more details on the competition see our dedicated blog page ‘Prose comp’. The deadline for entries is 15th November, 2014.