£25,000 to support local writing talent

We are delighted to announce the launch of the 2010 Northern Writers’ Awards. The annual awards, which are produced by New Writing North, support writers to complete new work and move forward with their careers. Each year £25,000 is awarded to support emerging talent and to recognise the work of established writers. Awards range from £1,000 to £10,000.

The Northern Writers’ Awards have been helping to boost writers’ careers since 2000. During the last ten years, 89 writers have received awards and a high percentage of those who have done so go on to successfully publish their work. Recent winners who have had great success include poet Toby Martinez de las Rivas , who was chosen as one of the Faber New Poets in 2009 and went on to see his first pamphlet published by Faber and Faber that year, and Carolyn Jess Cooke, whose first poetry collection, Inroads, will be published by Seren in February this year. Her new novel has also recently sold around the world and will be published in 2011 following support from New Writing North.

The Northern Writers’ Awards uniquely offer both financial and practical support to the winners, and each author who wins an award has access to a range of support including editorial support, manuscript appraisal, mentoring and introductions to the industry.
The winners will receive their awards at a special event in Newcastle and will attend an industry meet and greet in London in July.

The judges for the awards this year are:

Julia Churchill of the Greenhouse Literary Agency. The agency operates in both the UK and the US and specialises in representing children’s authors. Julia founded her reputation as a talent-spotter and deal-maker at the Darley Anderson Agency, where she developed the agency’s prestigious children’s books list. She joined Greenhouse in 2009 and is on the lookout for new storytelling talent.

Literary agent Madeleine Buston from the Darley Anderson Literary, TV & Film Agency. Madeleine is a fiction agent and handles all kinds of work with a commercial focus, including accessible literary, general fiction, and women’s fiction for a wide readership. Madeleine is also Head of Rights at the agency, handling US, foreign, and film and TV rights.

Writer Daljit Nagra, whose first collection of poetry, Look We Have Coming to Dover!, is one of the breakthrough poetry collections of the first decade of the century. It won him the South Bank Show Decibel Prize, the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and was nominated for the Costa Poetry Prize and the Guardian First Book Award.

The Northern Writers’ Awards are sponsored by Sunderland-based technology, media and communications company The Leighton Group, and are supported by Arts Council England.

The awards are open to writers who live and work in the north east of England. The deadline for entries is Wednesday 10 March 2010. Full entry information is available on our website at www.newwritingnorth.com/awards/awards.php?section=308.

A published collection, Ten Years On, bringing together new work from 11 previous winners of the awards, is available to buy from New Writing North’s web shop.