New Writing Ventures 2005 Literary Non-fiction Winners

WINNER: John Smart
John Smart is a teacher and writes various articles for literary magazines. His writing is either directly or indirectly connected with his role as a teacher. The work submitted for this award, Tarantula’s Web: John Hayward, T.S. Eliot and their circle, is the first biography that John Smart has attempted and he has been working on it for the past four years. “Tarantula” was the nickname John Hayward gave to himself.

RUNNER-UP: Bilal Ghafoor
Bilal Ghafoor was born in London in 1973. After university, he moved to Pakistan and later spent four years exploring Afghanistan, Iran, China and India. He now lives in London and is a professional chess coach. In between building cranes with his three and half year old son, he is reworking an account of his travels.

RUNNER-UP: Liz Diamond

Liz Diamond comes a background of writing poetry for many years, and in her thirties had poetry published in a number of poetry magazines and journals, and won some notable competitions.  She completed an anthology during her studies for an MA in Creative Writing at Glamorgan University in 1999. Since then she turned her attention to longer prose work, and was short-listed for the New Ventures 'creative non-fiction' 2005 award for an extract taken from her memoir.  This motivated her to 'have a go' at writing a novel, for which she received some Arts Council funding, and in January 2007 she secured a two-book deal with Picador.  Her first novel, 'An Accidental Light' will be coming out next April.  She is currently working on her second novel.