Winners 2021

C.D. Rose

C.D. Rose was born in Manchester at the tail end of the 1960s, then lived in half a dozen different countries before returning to the north of England. He has published The Biographical Dictionary of Literary Failure, Who’s Who When Everyone is Someone Else and – most recently – The Blind Accordionist (all published by Melville House), each a parafictional exploration of lost or forgotten books and writers.

Patricia Grace King

Patricia Grace King grew up in the southern United States. She has since lived in Spain and in Guatemala, where she worked as an accompanier of refugees during the civil war and later as a language school director.

Her novella, Day of All Saints, won the Miami University Novella Prize, while her short stories have appeared in Ploughshares, Narrative, The Gettysburg Review, and The Florida Review. She holds a PhD in Literature from Emory University and has served as the Carol Houck Smith Fellow at the University of Wisconsin and as a Fiction Fellow at Vermont Studio Center. After working as an activist and academic most of her life, she moved to Durham in 2015 and began writing full-time. She is currently completing a novel as well as a story collection.

patriciagraceking.com

Harry Man

Harry Man lives in Teesside. He has been an artist in residence at the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art and is a frequent workshop leader in schools, community centres, festivals, libraries and universities throughout Cumbria and North Yorkshire. His first pamphlet Lift was shortlisted for a Sabotage Best New Pamphlet Award and his second Finders Keepers, illustrated by the the artist Sophie Gainsley, was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry and was featured in BBC Radio 4’s Front Row. His dance theatre plays for children, Space Rebel Princess and Once Upon a Wall, have been performed at Stockton International Riverside Festival and Mouth of the Tyne among others. With Endre Ruset, he co-wrote Utøya Thereafter: Poems in Memory of the 2011 Norway Attacks which is published in Norway by Flamme Forlag (2021) and in the UK by Hercules Editions (2021). You can find more of his work at manmadebooks.co.uk

Lucy Burke

Lucy Burke is a writer for stage, screen and radio from Manchester. In 2018, Lucy’s play Weird – a play about OCD – transferred to the Soho Theatre from Edinburgh’s Pleasance Courtyard. In 2019, Lucy was commissioned by the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts (LIPA) to write I Am Not A Bird, I Cannot Fly, which was later shortlisted for the Through the Mill Playwriting Prize 2021. Lucy has been a member of both the Soho Theatre Writers’ Lab and the BBC Drama Room. In June 2020, Lucy’s debut radio play Ghosts was broadcast on BBC Radio 3.

Katie Hale

Based in Cumbria, Katie Hale is the author of a novel, My Name is Monster (Canongate, 2019), and two poetry pamphlets – and often writes about language, place, and stubborn women. She is a MacDowell Fellow, and has also undertaken residencies in the UK, Brussels and Tbilisi. She is a recent recipient of an Authors’ Foundation Grant, the 2022 Gulliver Travel Grant, and in 2021, she won a Northern Writers’ Debut Award for Poetry. She also writes for theatre and immersive digital performance and has featured on national television and radio. Her short fiction has been published in journals such as Hotel, Joyland and Under the Radar, and has been shortlisted for the Desperate Literature Prize, and longlisted for the Galley Beggar Press Prize and the BBC National Short Story Award. She is currently working on debut poetry collection, and a second novel. www.halekatie.com

I’m over the moon to have won a Northern Writers’ Award! The process of writing this novel (as with any book) has been full of hurdles and moments of self-doubt, so it makes such a difference when someone tells you it’s all worth it – like flagging in the latter part of a marathon, only to see a friendly face cheering you on towards the finish line. It isn’t just that the award provides support to live and write (though of course that’s hugely important!) but it’s also a much-needed confidence boost, in what is too often a solitary profession. Enormous thank you to the judges, and to New Writing North!

Amelia Loulli

Amelia Loulli is a poet and writer living in Cumbria. A pamphlet of her poetry is published by Nine Arches Press in Primers Volume Four. In 2020 she was awarded third prize in the Cafe Writer’s Poetry Competition and longlisted for the Women Poets’ Prize. Her work has been shortlisted for the Bridport Prize three times. In 2020 she was selected for New Writing North’s Inkubator scheme, for which she has received training to deliver creative writing workshops to young writers. Her work has appeared in Ink Sweat and Tears, Butcher’s Dog and The Rialto.

Currently completing an MA in Writing Poetry at Newcastle University, Amelia has plans to undertake a Creative Writing PhD. Meanwhile, she has recently finished writing a YA verse novel and is taking the first tentative steps to begin another, as well as working on a collection of essays and her first full-length poetry collection.

Jade Cuttle

Jade Cuttle is a poet and songwriter from rural North Yorkshire, working remotely at The Times as Arts Commissioning Editor. Her nature poetry has been commissioned for BBC Radio 3, BBC Contains Strong Language Festival and the BBC Proms, while her plant-whispering has been filmed for BBC One television. Fusing metaphor and melody, she released through Warren Records her debut album of poem-songs Algal Bloom to BBC Introducing acclaim, with funding from the PRS foundation, Make Noise Hull, and the University of East Anglia, where she completed her MA in Poetry to Distinction after graduating from Cambridge. Previously, she worked as a Poetry Editor at Ambit and at The Poetry Society, and judged numerous competitions including the Costa Book Awards and the Ginkgo Prize with Simon Armitage. Jade continues to lead workshops, tutor students at The Poetry School, perform at literature and music festivals, and complete commissions and writer-in-residencies.

Andy Ruffell

Andy Ruffell grew up in Kent but has spent almost all of his adult life living and working in Teesside and now lives in North Yorkshire. He always dreamed of writing a novel but was too afraid to start. Having worked as a teacher and head teacher for many years, Andy has written lots of extracts for children in school but never shared anything beyond the classroom walls. Undone is his debut novel. He lives in Hutton Rudby with his wife and two daughters.

Adam Farrer

Adam Farrer is the Editor of The Real Story, an Arts Council England-funded journal and spoken-word event series, working to nurture emerging creative nonfiction talent in the UK. He has performed his work and led workshops on creative nonfiction writing at many arts and literature festivals across the north, including Manchester Literature Festival, Sheffield Doc/Fest, the Not Quite Light Festival, The University of Salford’s Festival of Research, the Northern Lights Writers’ Conference and Dave Haslam’s WAM Festival Manchester. His essays have appeared in numerous journals and publications, most notably in Test Signal, an anthology of new northern writing published in 2021 by Dead Ink Books and Bloomsbury. He has been a photo lab technician, a kitchen porter, the voice of an automated phone system, an illustrator, a ceramicist, a musician and currently works at the University of Salford, where he is the Writer in Residence for Peel Park.

KB Jacobs

KB Jacobs trained as an actress at LAMDA. She most recently played Hermione in Erica Whyman’s production of The Winter’s Tale at the RSC.

She would consider herself to be an emerging writer. In 2018 she was a member of Eclipse Theatre’s Playwrighting Programme, led by Ola Animashawun. In 2020, she was longlisted for the Royal Court writers’ programme; also in 2021 she was longlisted for The Thousand Films/BBC scriptwriting competition and she most recently won a place on the inaugural Sky Writes screenwriting programme produced by Sky Studios in association with New Writing North. Her work attempts to promote kindness & compassion and encourages people to take that little leap of the imagination between what’s real and what might be.

Gareth Hewitt

Gareth Hewitt lives on the cusp of Lancashire and Merseyside with his wife and two daughters, where he works on his first novel between school runs and a career in healthcare. In 2015 he became a flash fiction judge with Mash Stories after winning the fifth instalment of the competition. Since then, he has focused on developing his writing and completing his first full-length work. He finds inspiration in the storytelling traditions of mythology and legend, whether found in ancient sagas or the modern superhero narrative, which lend a fantastical element to his literary fiction. His current project is an exploration of the journey through fatherhood, without the limitation of contemporary social boundaries.

Sarah Brooks

Sarah Brooks lives in Leeds, and is a member of the Leeds Writers’ Circle and the Northern Short Story Festival Academy. She has had stories published in magazines including Interzone, Strange Horizons, and Strix. She won the 2017 Bare Fiction Short Story Prize, the Walter Swan Short Story Prize 2017-18, and the Lucy Cavendish Fiction Prize 2019. Sarah works in East Asian Studies at the University of Leeds, where she also helps run the Leeds Centre for New Chinese Writing. She is co-editor of Samovar, a bilingual online magazine of translated speculative fiction.

Rob Schofield

Rob has been writing full time since receiving an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Exeter in 2017. He has completed work on a collection of short stories and is working on his second novel. His story ‘The Latest Draft of Me’ was highly commended by the judges of the Manchester Fiction Prize and another, ‘Late Capitalism’, appeared in The Blue Nib. ‘Terry Toast’ was longlisted for the Exeter Writers Short Story Prize and appeared in issue 29 of Prole Magazine; and ‘Jana’ was shortlisted for the Exeter Story Prize. In 2019 he was shortlisted for the Adventures in Fiction New Voices prize. Rob’s essays recording his progress as he worked through The Artist’s Way were published as part of The Blue Nib’s The Write Life series. Rob moved back up north in 2020 and he is currently a member of the Northern Short Story Festival Academy.

Harminder Kaur

Harminder Kaur was born in the UK to Indian parents. She studied creative writing at UEA as part of her BA in Literature and Film. After an MA in Literature at Sussex, Harminder has done a wide variety of jobs, including drug and alcohol worker, chef and kitchen manager, lecturer, live-in carer, and researcher.

Harminder’s life was interrupted by the onset of schizophrenia while she was studying for a PhD. One of the positive aspects of her illness was that it was a spiritual experience which led to her to becoming a Christian. She is currently writing a work of literary fiction which is made up of a series of linked stories about mental illness, race and faith.

In 2020 she was longlisted for the Penguin WriteNow programme.

In 2021 she received the Laura Kinsella Fellowship from the National Centre for Writing.

Gary Evans

Gary Evans is a feature writer (Guardian, Independent, Rolling Stone) and writer of short stories (Litro, Liars’ League, Fortnightly Review) currently working on a creative writing PhD at Newcastle University focused on screenwriting.

Greg Forrester

Greg Forrester (he/him) is a writer and PhD candidate based in Sunderland. He writes mostly works of magical realism, and has had short stories published by Fairlight Books and TL;DR Press. He is Managing Director and Co-Founder of Bandit Fiction, a not-for-profit digital publisher. Some of his favourite books are The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon, Fen by Daisy Johnson, and the His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman.

Shaun Wilson

Shaun Wilson was born in 1980 and raised in Wigton, Cumbria. He recently completed an MA in creative writing at Northumbria University, winning the prize for ‘Best Postgraduate Student in Humanities’. In 2018 his debut novel, a work-in-progress, made the final of the Penguin Random House WriteNow programme. In 2019 it won a TLC Northern Writers’ Award and an excerpt was published in Kit de Waal’s Common People anthology. Later that year, following New Writing North’s Talent Party, Shaun signed up with Susan Smith at MBA Agents. He is currently researching autofiction as a PhD student at Northumbria University, having won a Research Development Fund studentship in 2020, and most recently a Northern Bridge Consortium studentship in 2021. His debut novel is almost complete.

Amy Stewart

M.B. Shah

Katharine Goda

Sarah Corbett

Megumi Hoshiko

Meg has always had a passion for words since the days when she’d stand up in her cot and list all the words she knew every morning. These days, it would take years so she channels her energy into creating pieces which reflect her skewed outlook on the world. Meg enjoys experimenting with different writing styles and hopes to pursue a career in literature.

Read a sample of Meg’s writing here

Connie Schoales

Connie has been writing since she could first pick up a pen. Once a way for her to document stories about fairies and dragons, writing is now a way for her to express herself and escape (just a little) from the world. Writing and reading have always been her two main passions, and she enjoys writing stories and reading novels about the fantastical and the strange.

Read a sample of Connie’s writing here

Lily Tibbitts

Lily Tibbitts has been a keen writer since age four when she wrote her thrilling debut, The Man in the Bathtub, and she’s continued to write almost every day since, winning the Rotary Young Writer competition for the last three years. She’s part of the Amble Young Writers’ group with New Writing North where she’s gained confidence in her writing, learned how to structure the perfect story and discovered chocolate fudge is the best writing food. Currently, Lily is working on the second draft of her YA novel about ink-themed magic and cheesy music, and she hopes to go on to study English literature at university.

Read a sample of Lily’s writing here

Jennifer Mabbott

Jen Mabbott has been writing for a few years, trying several genres before settling on comedy. She has previously won the Louise Rennison National Funny Award for co-written piece ‘Do It Yourself’, while her other entries were given positive reviews from the judges. Jen also co-hosts Crimes Against Comedy, a podcast discussing her love for British comedy with friend Kiki Peckham. She also hopes to begin performing stand-up and begins to study Creative Media – Film, TV & Broadcast later in the year.

Read a sample of Jen’s writing here

Lacey Williamson

Lacey Williamson is a 16-year-old poet from Barnsley. Writing has always been a form of therapy to her. For longer than she can remember, she’s always been drawn to reading books and writing short stories and poems. Lacey joined Barnsley Young Writers through Child & Adolescent Mental Health Services after struggling with ill mental health. Through CAMHS and Barnsley Young Writers, she’s gained the ability to channel her ever-changing emotions into poetry.

Lacey feels lucky to have found her tribe and hopes there are more opportunities in the North for young writers to flourish these days. She hopes that those who also struggle with their mental health will find comfort in connecting with others who like to write, and in reading great poetry. Her favourite pamphlet is Phoebe Stuckes’ Gin & Tonic.

Lacey’s confidence and positivity has grown massively since joining a young writers’ community. She’s had her work published in anthologies including Hive’s ‘Surfing the Twilight’ and she’s performed at open mics. She also spent a weekend writing at Ilkley Literature Festival summer camp.

Lacey never leaves the house without a pen and notepad, as inspiration strikes with no warning wherever she goes!

Read a sample of Lacey’s writing here