Fiction
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This year's Fiction category winner, Eleanor Thom
(pictured), is now represented by Euan Thorneycroft of A M
Heath.
J Dee Hall, who was Commended by the judges, has had
his novel Moths accepted by Chatto & Windus;
it will be published in the spring of 2007.
Biographies
Winner
Eleanor Thom won
with
Burns, which is a chapter taken from her first
novel, a work-in-progress. Burns also
appeared in Outside of a Dog, (Black and White,
2006), an anthology of work by students on the MA in Creative
Writing at the University of Glasgow. Eleanor was born in London in
1979 and now lives in Scotland. New Writing Ventures is the first
major competition in which she has been shortlisted. The
inspiration for her novel came from the experiences of her mother’s
family, Travellers who settled in Elgin between the 1920s and
1950s. A non-fiction article on her linguistics research was
published in issue 234 of The New Shetlander. She has
worked as a town planner, a research assistant and most recently as
a nanny; she loves travelling, particularly around Scotland and
usually with a fiddle.
Runners-up
Carol Rifka Brunt's submission
was
Mine. Since studying philosophy at the University of
St. Andrews, Carol has been writing short fiction, essays and
feature articles that have appeared in a number of magazines and
journals including, The North American Review and The
Sun Magazine. During that time she moved from Scotland to
Massachusetts to British Columbia, back to Massachusetts and
finally to a small town on the edge of Dartmoor where she lives
with her husband and three children. While in Massachusetts she
worked as a contributing editor for a local newspaper, where she
wrote feature stories on everything from the peppermint industry in
the 1800s to the effects of Strontium-90 on baby teeth.
Lenya Samanis is enrolled on the
Creative Writing MA at Birkbeck College, where she is working on
her first novel, Yen. Her first piece of work to be
published was in the 2006 Mechanics' Institute Review.
Read
Cherry Blossom.
A selection of writers were also Commended by the judges:
Iain Broome;
Glenda Cooper;
Philip Corker;
Ashton Cotier; J Dee Hall (see above); Paul Houghton; and
Ian Madden.
Candida Clark, Chair of Judges for Fiction, comments:
“With so many competing forms of narrative and diverse pressures,
not least commercial, it was a great pleasure to find so many new
writers tackling their work with such tremendous energy and a
palpable desire to find their own way. It’s one of the best things
to discover in a piece of work: vivid signs of life! Add to that
the sense of determined enthusiasm and a good deal of skill, and
you have a very strong shortlist this year indeed, and an excellent
showcase for emerging talents.”
The judging panel comprised Candida Clark, Patricia Duncker and
Courttia Newland. Click
here to read the Fiction judges' biographies.
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