Winners 2002

Richard Caddell

Carol Clewlow

Carol Clewlow’s first novel, Keeping the Faith, was shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize. Her second, the bestselling A Woman’s Guide to Adultery, was translated into 15 languages and turned into a TV mini-series. A further novel, Love in the Modern Sense, plus a number of her short stories have been read on Radio 4. A version of the fourth, One for the Money, was performed as at the Edinburgh Fringe. Her last novel, Not Married Not Bothered, was also a bestseller and published in several European countries.

Also a playwright, she is a founder member of Operating Theatre, a ground-breaking theatre company producing drama on medical and health issues, and for whom she has written almost two dozen plays.

Chrissie Glazebrook

Chrissie Glazebrook’s short stories, poetry and journalism were widely published in magazines and newspapers and broadcast on radio. The Madolescents, her first novel, was published by Heinemann in 2001 and by Arrow in 2002. Her second novel, Blue Spark Sisters, appeared in 2003, again from Heinemann and Arrow. She died in 2007.

Victoria Bennett

Victoria Bennett is a disabled writer, poet and producer, living with genetic haemochromatosis and hypermobile Ehlers Danlos Syndrome+. In 1999, she founded the radical-rural Wild Women Press collective and curates the #WildWomanWeb. Long ago, in 2002, she won a New Writing North Northern Promise Award and the inaugural Andrew Waterhouse Award and has published four pamphlets. Her forthcoming poetry pamphlet, To Start The Year From Its Quiet Centre, is due out in Autumn 2020 with Indigo Dreams Publishing.

She is a co-director of The Wizard and The Wyld, bringing together digital gaming and literature and is currently undertaking an MRes Creative Practice with the University of Highlands and Islands (Shetland), combining poetry, memoir and XR technology to explore narratives of absence within landscapes of personal and ecological loss.

Her work-in-progress nature memoir, All My Wild Mothers, was long-listed for the Nan Shepherd Prize (2019). An intimate story of motherhood, loss and planting, this is her first full-length creative non-fiction work. She is a full-time carer at home and lives in Cumbria with her husband and young son. When not juggling motherhood and creative projects, she can be found howling in the hills with the Wild Women, her creative tribe.

“My first contact with New Writing North was back in 1997. I was a young woman, newly moved to Cumbria and recovering from agoraphobia. New Writing North supported me through a mentoring programme with Linda France. This experience changed my life and gave me the confidence to set up Wild Women Press and publish my first pamphlet, Anchoring the Light. The intervening years have been ones shaped by the demands of motherhood, full-time care and chronic illness, as well as learning to live with the impact of traumatic grief.

To be supported by New Writing North again through the Northern Debut Award at this stage in my writing life feels very special. It not only gives me confidence in my non-fiction writing, but it also validates that voice and provides a practical platform, professional support and financial freedom to enable me to complete the work. I am immensely grateful to New Writing North for this award and opportunity.”

Joanna Boulter

Joanna Boulter was born in 1942 and grew up in Wiltshire. Her poetry has earned her a Tyrone Guthrie Fellowship from Northern Arts, a Northern Promise award from New Writing North, and a Hawthornden Fellowship. In 2003 she won first prize in the Poetry London competition. Publications include three pamphlets: Running With The Unicorns (The Bay Press, 1994), On Sketty Sands (Arrowhead, 2001), and The Hallucinogenic Effects of Breathing (Arrowhead, 2003). She is a founder member of the Darlington women’s writing co-operative Vane Women, teaches a women’s writing class, and works as an editor.

Joanna’s first full-length poetry collection, Twenty Four Preludes and Fugues on Dmitri Shostakovich (Arc, 2006) takes the form of a long sequence based on the life and turbulent times of the Russian composer and was nominated for the Forward Best First Collection Prize in 2007.

Deborah Bruce

Barrie Darke

Barrie Darke has written steadily since winning a Northern Promise Award in 2002. Theatre took up most of the first few years. He worked with Live Theatre on their 30th anniversary production, Cap-a-Pie, and also a few BBC co-productions. But prose was always the main thing, especially the novel (or The Novel). While working on the next novel – he’s always working on the next novel – he also sends short stories to every webzine, anthology and publication he can find. This gathers in a lot of rejections, but also a fair few acceptances over the years: more than 25 and counting, anyway, which is just about enough to keep the confidence going. He also teaches creative writing, in more than one venue, on more than one evening a week.

Eileen Jennison

Kathleen Kenny

Apart from her own writing, Kathleen Kenny also works as a freelance creative writing tutor based on Tyneside. Among other funding bodies, Kathleen has received recognition from the Sammy Johnson Memorial Fund, and The Royal Literary Fund. She has published several poetry collections and has given readings of her work in various locations, including a recent outing at The West Cork Literary Festival, where she read with Eavan Boland. Kathleen is currently engaged with a trilogy of autobiographical novels which explore her Irish/Geordie background, beginning in London in 1940 with the meeting of her Irish mother and her Irish/Geordie father, and ending on Tyneside in 1971.

Christine Powell

Marlynn Rosario

Victoria Bennett

Victoria Bennett is a disabled writer, poet and producer, living with genetic haemochromatosis and hypermobile Ehlers Danlos Syndrome+. In 1999, she founded the radical-rural Wild Women Press collective and curates the #WildWomanWeb. Long ago, in 2002, she won a New Writing North Northern Promise Award and the inaugural Andrew Waterhouse Award and has published four pamphlets. Her forthcoming poetry pamphlet, To Start The Year From Its Quiet Centre, is due out in Autumn 2020 with Indigo Dreams Publishing.

She is a co-director of The Wizard and The Wyld, bringing together digital gaming and literature and is currently undertaking an MRes Creative Practice with the University of Highlands and Islands (Shetland), combining poetry, memoir and XR technology to explore narratives of absence within landscapes of personal and ecological loss.

Her work-in-progress nature memoir, All My Wild Mothers, was long-listed for the Nan Shepherd Prize (2019). An intimate story of motherhood, loss and planting, this is her first full-length creative non-fiction work. She is a full-time carer at home and lives in Cumbria with her husband and young son. When not juggling motherhood and creative projects, she can be found howling in the hills with the Wild Women, her creative tribe.

“My first contact with New Writing North was back in 1997. I was a young woman, newly moved to Cumbria and recovering from agoraphobia. New Writing North supported me through a mentoring programme with Linda France. This experience changed my life and gave me the confidence to set up Wild Women Press and publish my first pamphlet, Anchoring the Light. The intervening years have been ones shaped by the demands of motherhood, full-time care and chronic illness, as well as learning to live with the impact of traumatic grief.

To be supported by New Writing North again through the Northern Debut Award at this stage in my writing life feels very special. It not only gives me confidence in my non-fiction writing, but it also validates that voice and provides a practical platform, professional support and financial freedom to enable me to complete the work. I am immensely grateful to New Writing North for this award and opportunity.”