Making time and space to write with Arvon
Arvon generously supports the Arvon Award, which is open to prose writers at any career stage currently living in the North of England, and offers the chance to take a tutored or untutored Arvon course.
Plus, winners of all our Northern Writers’ Awards win an online Arvon at Home Masterclass of their choice as part of the wider package of ongoing career support we offer to all award winners.
We asked some of our previous award winners about their experience taking part in the in-person and online Arvon courses they won, and the difference these made to their writing practice.
Laura Tisdall, Arvon Award Winner 2024
I’m so grateful to the Northern Writers’ Awards for the Arvon Award, which allowed me to attend my absolute dream residential Arvon course at Lumb Bank, tutored by Julia Armfield and Eliza Clark, two stars of feminist speculative fiction. But even better, it put me in touch with a group of brilliant fellow early-career writers. We’re still sharing work and supporting each other, and hope to go on another retreat next summer!
Xani Byrne, Arvon Award Winner 2025
A good friend kept telling me to enter the Northern Writers’ Awards. She was right. Last year, I won the Arvon Award. After browsing the courses for a few weeks, I booked the residential Narrative Non-Fiction course with Tom Parfitt and Lois Pryce at The Hurst. For five days we gathered around a Traitors-sized table with acclaimed journalists and seasoned authors. One evening I cooked Arvon’s own salmon recipe with a wizened adventurer, and later that night, led by a literary mountaineer, we crept through a graveyard on the way back from the village pub. I left with fewer words and felt better about each one. Now I’m scrolling through the courses again and telling friends to enter.
Tammie Ash, Northern Promise TLC Award Winner 2025
I attended the “How to Bring Your Characters to Life” Arvon at Home Writing Masterclass with AJ Pearce. I find it invaluable hearing from an experienced author who has been through the real nitty gritty of writing a novel and is willing to teach others and offer guidance based on those experiences, as AJ has. The Arvon workshops allow me to take step back from my own writing and think about concepts and ideas I’d not considered before. I love the practical exercises and they widen my bubble of thinking. I think also in this day and age where usually all you see is the finished book promoted on social media or in a bookshop, it’s so refreshing to hear directly from authors and really get to learn about their process and the journey they had to go through.
Mie Murasa, A Writing Chance Participant 2024
As well as attending an Arvon writing retreat at the Hurst as part of A Writing Chance, I won a place on the Arvon at Home Writing Masterclass “Shaping Your Non-Fiction” with Jessica J Lee. In my degree studies, memoir was rarely touched on, and I’ve found it so rare to find such clear, insightful and inspiring advice on writing memoir. Being able to take the masterclass with Jessica J Lee was foundational to my current work in progress: she opened my eyes to a variety of structures which I’d seen in action but never heard articulated, such as meandering plots, so I could replicate them in my own writing. It was a really energising experience and I’m glad I was able to take part at this time in my writing journey. There were plenty of resources and other books referred to during the masterclass, so I was able to continue my learning afterwards.
