Winners 2009

Marion Husband

Winner of the first Andrea Badenoch Prize for Fiction in 2005 for Paper Moon, Marion graduated with distinction and won the Blackwell Prize for Best Performance for the MA in creative writing at Northumbria University in 2003. Her first novel, The Boy I Love, was published in July 2005 to much critical acclaim. Its sequel, Paper Moon, was published in 2006 and followed by Say You Love Me and The Good Father in 2007. Marion is married with two children and lives in the Tees Valley.

Rebecca Jenkins

Rebecca Jenkins is a cultural historian, novelist and biographer. Her biography of 19th century actress Fanny Kemble, The Reluctant Celebrity, was short-listed for the 2005 Theatre Book Prize, and her social history, The First London Olympics, 1908, was long-listed for the William Hill Sport Book of the Year Award. The Duke’s Agent is the first of her FR Jarrett mysteries, set in the north east of England during Regency times. The second book in the series, Death of a Radical, was published by Quercus in November 2010. She lives in Teesdale.

Lorna Elliott

Lorna Elliott won a Northern Promise Award in 2009. She is a qualified barrister and solicitor from Whitley Bay who left the law to pursue a profession as a writer.

Pru Kitching

Pru Kitching trained for the theatre and married painter and stage designer Gerald Kitching. Following his death in 1989 she ran away to Copenhagen from where, as Secretary General of the International Amateur Theatre Association, she travelled extensively and wrote copiously. Pru now lives in Upper Weardale in the North Pennines. Her first poetry pamphlet, All Aboard the Moving Staircase, was published in 2004 by Vane Women Press. Her second, The Kraków Egg, was published by Arrowhead Press in 2008.

Richard Rippon

Richard Rippon started writing in 2007 and has had several short stories published in magazines, newspapers and anthologies. In 2009 he won a Northern Writers’ Award for the opening chapters of a novel, The Kebab King. He is currently finishing The Kebab King, working on new short fiction and collaborating with a local artist on some graphic stories.

Pippa Little

Pippa Little is a poet. She also reviews for magazines such as The North and Salzburg Review and translates Hungarian poetry. Born in Africa, she grew up in Scotland and is now settled in south east Northumberland with her family. Her work is in magazines and anthologies all over the world. Prizes include an Eric Gregory, the Andrew Waterhouse Award 2009, the Norman MacCaig Centenary Poetry Prize, the Scotsman Hogmanay Haiku, the Anam Cara Poetry Prize and the Biscuit Prize, and poems have been placed or highly commended in many competitions, including Ledbury, Wigtown and Mslexia. Collaborations include Conversations Across Borders and FilmPoem by Alastair Cook.Having worked for many years in the OU, Lifelong Learning, and literacy development she enjoys working with groups and workshops. She has read at StAnza and Durham Festivals and at many venues around the UK and Eire and in Mexico City. She is a member of the women’s writing group, Carte Blanche, and is happy to be part of the North East’s supportive and vibrant writing culture.

Selected publications
The Spar Box (Vane Women Press, 2006) PBS Pamphlet Choice 2006 (copies available from the author)
Foray (Biscuit Press, 2008)
The Snow Globe (Red Squirrel Press, 2011)
Overwintering (Oxford Poets/Carcanet, 2012)
Oxford Poets 2010, eds. David Constantine, Robyn Marsack and Bernard O’Donoghue

Sarah Shaw

Sarah Shaw has had articles, stories and poems published in magazines that include Wasafiri, Mslexia, The Yellow Room and The London Magazine. Her novel, Make It Back, about women in the Spanish Civil War and Thatcher’s Britain, was published by Tonto Books. In 2009, her stories won the Andrea Badenoch Fiction Award; she has completed a collection of short fiction about twenty-first-century Britons, in all their diversity, as they face various predicaments. She is writing another novel as the main part of her research in creative writing at Northumbria University. She loves writing and teaching.

Selected publications
Make It Back (Tonto Books, 2009)