Winners 2010

Mari Hannah

In 2009, Mari acquired a top London agent at Blake Friedmann Literary, TV and Film agency. Soon afterwards, German rights were sold at auction. This was the first translation deal for the Newcastle/Northumberland-based crime series featuring the critically acclaimed DCI Kate Daniels.

Rights to her first eight books were acquired by Pan Macmillan. She has just signed new contracts with Thomas Dunne in the US and publishing giant, Orion, in the UK for books featuring DI David Stone and DS Frances Oliver.

Mari won the Polari First Book Prize for her debut, The Murder Wall, and a Northern Writers’ Time to Write Award in 2010 for her second novel, Settled Blood. She has twice been shortlisted for a CWA Dagger in the Library (2014/2017) and was longlisted for the Dublin International Literary Award 2017 for The Silent Room, a Ryan and O’Neil title. She has been nominated in the Journal Culture Awards 2017 in the ‘Writer of the Year’ category.

Her Kate Daniels crime series is in development with Stephen Fry’s production company, Sprout Pictures. She is currently the reader-in-residence for Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival.

Rebecca Muddiman

Rebecca Muddiman is a novelist and scriptwriter, based in Redcar. She won a Time to Write Award in 2010, as well as the Northern Crime Competition in 2012 for her first novel, Stolen, which was published by Moth in 2013. It was followed by three more books in the same series, Gone (2015), Tell Me Lies (2016) and Murder in Slow Motion (2018) and two standalone psychological thrillers, No Place Like Home (2018) and The Art of Murder (2019).

In 2016 she was selected for the London Screenwriters Festival Talent Campus with a screenplay about Heloise and Abelard, which she subsequently adapted into a novel called Devotion. In 2019 she was selected for Live Theatre’s Playwriting course with a play called 99 which was the starting point for her novel-in-progress, Rebel Girl. She has also been published in The Guardian, Simple Things, Vintage Script and the anthologies Home Tomorrow and She’s the One. Before writing full-time, she worked for the NHS for eleven years.

Beda Higgins

Beda Higgins is an award winning author and poet. She has two collections of short stories published: CHAMELEON and LITTLE CRACKERS. CHAMELEON was chosen as a Read Regional Recommendation and long-listed for the Edgehill Prize. LITTLE CRACKERS was long-listed for the Frank O’ Connor Award and the Edgehill Prize, and includes a first prize winner Mslexia short story. Her first collection of poetry OURSELVES was joint winner of the Geoff Stevens award 2020 and is currently short-listed for the Pigott Poetry Prize 2021. She has poetry and prose published in a variety of anthologies and collections, and as a nurse is the recipient of two Queen’s Nursing Institute Awards.

Website: www.bedahiggins.org

Andrew Dawson

Originally from South Africa, Andrew moved to the UK in 2002. Since then, he has lived in the North East, working as an advertising copywriter. He has an MA in creative writing from Northumbria University. His short stories have appeared online and in magazines. He has had stage plays produced by companies including Live Theatre and Drip Action Theatre in West Sussex. One of his scripts was shortlisted for the BBC radio play competition Moving Stories. Andrew won a Northern Writers’ Award in 2010 and is currently completing his first novel, Bait, a thriller set in London and Durban, where the main protagonist seeks revenge on her sister’s killers. He is also working on a sequel to Bait.

Elizabeth Lawson

Elizabeth has been making up stories since before she could write and had some early (but small) success in local competitions. In she wrote a poem which came joint second in the Ouseburn festival, in 2006 a short story was commended in a National competition run by the WI, in 2009 an extract of her work was the first to be feature by the Times Chicken House competition and in 2009 she won Morpeth Gathering’s competition for a novel set in Northumberland. All of which helped her confidence as did winning a Northern Promise Award in 2010. But she was still horribly aware of how little technique she knew. Since 2010 she’s been working hard to put this right and is currently developing a story full of mammoths, airships and danger.

Stevie Ronnie

After publishing his first poetry pamphlet in 2008 Stevie began experimenting with the possibilities for poetry when digital technology was applied to its production and presentation. In 2010 Stevie received a Northern Promise Award for his work, enabling him to complete his first full collection, published in 2013 and launched at Ilkley Literature festival.

Stevie’s literary experiments with art and technology have led to a mutli-disciplinary practice which often has poetry at its heart. He also writes scripts and stories and his poetry films have won several awards and screened at festivals around the world.

Stevie’s visual artworks and artist’s books have been exhibited across the UK and internationally and are included in several public and private collections. He often works as a creative tutor and mentor in schools, communities and as part of the core team for The Writing Squad.

Degna Stone

Degna Stone is a Midlander in self-imposed exile. She visited Newcastle for the summer in 1999 and never managed to go home. She’s a regular performer on the North East spoken word scene and won a Northern Promise Award for her poetry in 2010. ID on Tyne Press published her chapbook, Between the Floorboards, in 2010.

She edits the online anthology Deeseeded, is co-founder and Managing Editor of Butcher’s Dog poetry magazine and holds an MA in Creative Writing from Newcastle University.

Online
http://inadvertentlyteaching.blogspot.co.uk
Twitter: @Degna

Sophie Baker

Jane Thomas

Jane Thomas lives and writes in the countryside deep in Northumberland. She graduated from the creative writing MA programme of Northumbria University in 2001, since when she has taught creative writing in the community as well as developing her own work. She works primarily in prose and is currently engaged on a full-length historical novel set in 1910. As a respite from the novel, she is producing short fiction with the theme of death.