London Writing Workshops

The People’s Book Prize looks like a worthwhile project. It aims to cut out the middlemen (and women) by offering readers a chance to promote the books they love. Each month there’s a vote, and the overall winning book will be declared in July 2010. Beryl Bainbridge is a patron.

Interesting to see their list of participating publishers – small  independent presses like Tindal Street and Legend rubbing shoulders with the likes of HarperCollins and Orion:

http://www.peoplesbookprize.com/publisher.php

Thanks to the British Council one of my stories has just been published in a dual language English/Chinese anthology called A Little Nest of Pedagogues. My story is a short piece called ‘Stranger’, which originally appeared in New Writing 13 (Picador, 2005); it was subsequently reprinted in a German magazine and now it’s travelling even further afield.

I’m one of ten writers, including Emily Perkins, Kamila Shamsie, Romesh Gunesekera and Fay Weldon, whose work has been translated here. The back cover describes the collection as ‘new writing from established writers and names to watch’. I’m amazed and delighted.

Kathy Page’s new novel, The Find, will be published in Canada on the 8th of April.The Find is set in British Columbia, where Kathy has lived since 2001. It tells the story of Anna Silowski, a palaeontologist, who leads a team excavating a prehistoric creature discovered in a remote part of BC, and Scott, a young local man who is drafted in to work on the project, and on whom Anna comes to rely. It’s a book about choice and possibility, and how a seemingly ‘impossible’ relationship, against all odds, transforms the lives of two people.

Kathy will be co-teaching  with me on the weekend of March 13th and 14th in London, and she will also be the Writer in Residence for the Invisible Threads project at Fermynwoods Contemporary Arts in Northants, during March.

Congratulations to Annemarie Neary. Having been short-listed for the 2008 Bridport Fiction Prize, she is now one of eleven supplementary prizewinners of the 2009 Fiction Prize. This means that her story ‘Siren’ will be published in the forthcoming  Bridport anthology. Annemarie attended the Microfiction workshop in 2008 and took part in the first Novelists’ Club in 2009, although we can’t claim any credit for her success – ‘Siren’ was written before the course started. The 2009 Bridport Fiction prize was judged by Ali Smith.

The  Literary quarterly Ambit is celebrating its 200th issue with a 200  word poetry or prose competition -  £500 goes to the winner. See their site for more details:

http://www.ambitmagazine.co.uk/

Congratulations to the novelist Toby Litt, winner of the  2009 Manchester Fiction Prize, which was judged anonymously by Nicholas Royle and Sarah M Hall. See here for more details:

http://www.manchesterwritingcompetition.co.uk/fiction/winners.php

The Short Review is a fantastic website devoted to the art of short form fiction. Reviews of new anthologies and single-author collections, plus interviews with authors – wide-ranging and always interesting.

They’re currently giving away 5 copies of Rebecca Miller’s new collection, Personal Velocity. Have a look:

http://www.theshortreview.com/

The Asham Award anthology Waving at the Gardener (ed. Kate Pullinger) is now available to buy online from Bloomsbury. It’s a  wonderfully varied collection – and I’m not just saying that because I have a story in there! (‘Visitors’, on p119).

For me some of the stand-out pieces are Esther Freud’s account of the First Palestine Literary Festival; Alison Dunn’s ‘Omi’s Ghosts’; overall winner Jo Lloyd’s ‘Because It Is Running By’; Erica Rocca’s ‘Something Small and Understood’ and Margaret Atwood’s ‘Rape Fantasies’. Well worth £6.

http://www.bloomsbury.com/Books/details.aspx?isbn=9780747598763

I was very pleased  to hear that my story ‘Rich’ was selected as one of the finalists in Narrative Magazine’s 2009 Spring Contest. It’s a website well worth visiting.

http://www.narrativemagazine.com/

Congratulations to The Short Review editor, Tania Hershman, winner of the Grand Prize in the University of Maine’s  Ultra-Short Competition (50 word stories). I’m also on the shortlist, which I was pleased about, given that they had over 900 entries from all over the world.

http://www.umm.maine.edu/sixth-annual-ultra-short-competition.html

(See more recent post for details about The Short Review.)