Winners 2006

Celia Bryce

Celia Bryce is an author and singersongwriter with many short stories published and broadcast since switching careers from nursing to the arts. Having written local history, nursing and travel pieces alongside drama and poetry, Celia now spends her time writing fiction and songs which she sings at every opportunity. When she’s not doing that Celia is running writing workshops in schools, libraries and in the community. Celia has an MA in creative writing and taught on the MA course at UNN. Her literary short stories have been widely published in England and Ireland. Her novel Anthem for Jackson Dawes was nominated for the CILIP Carnegie Medal and listed for a number of other awards. Celia won the Richard Imison Award for Radio Drama in 2003, and she took part in the Read Regional Campaign of 2014.

She is a core contributor to Women’s Weekly, which pays for guitar strings, guitar straps and an ever growing array of boots and shoes.

Online
Celia Bryce
@celiabryce

Barbara Gamble

Barbara Gamble has lived in Teesside for over 25 years and has had two novels published. The first, Out of Season, was runner-up in the Constable Trophy for the best first novel written in the north of England, and long-listed for the Booker Prize. Her second novel, Partial Recoveries, was followed by the paperback edition of Out of Season, which also came out in paperback in Australia.

She has just completed Stargazing, the novel which earned her a Time to Write Award in April 2006, and has now started work on another book. All her novels are about people who live in some way on the margins of society and all are set in some indefinable town or city in the North.

Valerie Laws

Valerie Laws is a poet, crime and comedy novelist, playwright and sci-art specialist. Her latest collection, All That Lives, won her a Time to Write Award, in 2006. Its poetry of sex, death and pathology, arises from funded residencies at a London pathology museum and KCL Medical School, and at Newcastle University working with neuroscientists and pathologists. Her 11 books include three full collections of poetry, crime fiction in the form of Northern Promise Award-winner The Rotting Spot, comedy and drama. She has had 12 plays commissioned for stage and BBC radio, and won many prizes and awards, including a Wellcome Trust Arts Award, and two prizes in the National Poetry Competition.

Science-themed poetry installations and commissions include the infamous Quantum Sheep, an Arts Council-funded project which involved spray-painting random haiku onto live sheep. She featured in BBC2 TV’s documentary Why Poetry Matters, and appeared live at the Royal Festival Hall with a quantum haiku on inflatable beach balls. Her poetry AV installations, which change to reflect their subjects, feature in public exhibitions in London, Berlin and Newcastle, and her embedded haiku Window of Art computer-controlled illuminated commission is in St Thomas Hospital. She has undertaken many residencies, including in Egypt, and recently in a physic garden. She performs her work extensively in the media and live at festivals and events in UK, Ireland and New York.

Selected publications
All That Lives (Red Squirrel Press, 2011)
Lydia Bennet’s Blog (Kindle & Smashwords, 2012)
The Rotting Spot (Kindle 2011, Red Squirrel Press 2009)
Changing Age, Changing Minds (IAH, University of Newcastle, 2011)

Website: www.valerielaws.co.uk
Twitter: @ValerieLaws

Tess Hudson

Having won various writing prizes and competitions while living in London, Tess became a professional script/sketch writer on several shows, including Smack the Pony, Doctors and Hollyoaks. In 2000, she spent a long spell in hospital following a spinal infection and began writing for the sake of writing; poems, short stories, a journal of thoughts and feelings. She began to research the subject of writing for health and found evidence from researchers showing that expressive writing could be used to benefit health and wellbeing.

In 2005, she completed an MA in creative writing at Newcastle University during which she took Cynthia Fuller’s module in Writing for Health. She then went on to win New Writing North’s Northern Promise Award for a collection of short stories. Tess co-founded Pen and Tonic, a Newcastle-based community organisation that promotes the health benefits of expressive writing. Since the publication of their book, interest in Pen and Tonic has spread nationally.

Carol McGuigan

Carol McGuigan began writing in 1996. Her first play, the semi-autobiographical Inside Uitlander did very well at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and was subsequently broadcast on Radio 4. She went on to have seven more BBC radio plays commissioned and broadcast, including an adaptation for Woman’s Hour. Her last, The Painter and the Fishergirl, was based on American painter Winslow Homer’s stay in Cullercoats and starred Henry Goodman. Theatre plays include pieces for Live Theatre: The Holiness of the Great North Runner; Polls Apart, an adaptation of Julia Darling’s The Taxi Driver’s Daughter, Heartbreakers and Here Come The Girls. She wrote a feature-length screenplay, River Angel, for London-based Jump Monk Productions and a short film, The Pictures, for Film in a Week. Since 2005 she has been writing prose. Her short story, Agnostic, was selected by guest editor Michelle Roberts for Mslexia and A Pearl’s Tale and Natalya’s Tale can be found in the Tyneside Tales anthology published by Endpapers. A ghost story, The Dead Reckoning, appears in Phantoms at the Phil 2, published by Northern Gothic and Sidereal Press. Her first novel, Lying Apart, won a Northern Promise Award in 2006.

Kate Fox

Kate Fox is a poet and performer. She’s been a regular on Radio 4’s Saturday Live since 2007 and her poems have appeared on many radio shows including Radio 4’s The Today Programme, The Wondermentalist Cabaret, Arthur Smith’s Balham Bash and Poetry Pop Up. She’s written commissioned pieces for Radio 2’s Grimm Up North, Radio 3’s The Verb and BBC2’s Daily Politics and Chelsea Flower Show coverage.

Her spoken word show, Kate Fox News, was produced by New Writing North and ARC and toured to the Edinburgh Fringe and nationally in 2010. Her family spoken word show, The Starting Line, was commissioned by Great North Run Culture and Manchester Children’s Book Festival in 2012 and produced by ARC, Stockton, where she is an associate artist. She was poet in residence for the Great North Run in 2011. She has run writing and performance workshops for numerous schools, festivals and the Arvon Foundation and enjoys mentoring and facilitating others in thinking about their creative process. She writes a weekly column for Newcastle’s The Journal newspaper. Her novel A Portrait of an Autist as a Young Woman was shortlisted in Mslexia’s novel competition in 2012 and is represented by Robert Kirby at United Agents. Her first full-length poetry collection is published by Smokestack in February 2013.

Selected publications
We Are Not Stone (With Jenni Haukio)(Ek Zuban Press, 2006)
Kate Fox News (New Writing North, 2010)
Fox Populi (Smokestack, 2013)

Online
Website: www.katefox.co.uk
Twitter: @katefoxwriter

Shauna Mackay

Shauna Mackay has been writing since 1998 when she attended a course in Blyth. A story she wrote was shortlisted for a national competition and was published in the Sunday People magazine. She then undertook an MA in creative writing at Northumbria University, where she wrote a novel. In 2000 she received a Northern Promise Award and found an agent to represent her novel. In 2006, she was named as winner of the Andrea Badenoch Fiction Award. The prize fund supported her to work on her novel, The Love Games of Tower Blocks.