Master's in Creative Writing

MSt alumnus C.A. Blintkios’ novel The Smoke is Me, Burning is now available for pre-sale with Kernpunkt Press.

Jonathan McAloon, journalist for the BBC, The Guardian, and TLS, says of the book that it is “a sort of scrapbook of place magic. Almost told by ecology itself, The Smoke is Me, Burning has a reliable cyclical power that is often the mark of good art.”

More information here.

Follow

Share

MSt alumna Laura Theis has won first prize in the Oxford Brookes International Poetry Competition 2021, in the category for poets who speak English as an Additional Language. 

The prize, awarded by The Poetry Centre at Oxford Brookes, was judged this year by award-winning poet Will Harris. Laura’s was one of two top prizes of £1,000 in a competition that seeks to celebrate the great diversity of poetry being written in English all over the world.

An online awards ceremony will take place on Tuesday 7 December from 6.30-7.30pm GMT. To read Laura’s winning entry and to register for the ceremony, click here. 

Follow

Share

Comedian, author and actor Helen Lederer launched the Comedy Women in Print Prize (CWIP) in 2019, to recognise, celebrate and encourage witty women authors. 

With not only a sequel but a Netflix adaptation in the works, MSt alumna Jesse Satanto’s Dial A for Aunties has been recognised as the 2021 winner. 

Of her win, the Independent says of Sutanto that, “her novel is about looking up into the branches of a family tree and finding strength as well as infuriating relatives. And if it pushes bright young women … to discover that they’re capable of more than they imagined, all the better.”

Follow

Share

MSt alumna Rose Edwards has published her second novel with UCLan. The Ember Days follows Rose’s earlier novel, The Harm Tree, on 7 October.

“Exiled from a broken land, two friends try to escape the darkness they left behind them. Together again, Torny and Ebba reach Vellsberg, an outpost of the Southern Empire, hoping for a safe haven. Instead, they find families driven by ambition, a strange young woman who doesn’t seem to belong, and the bloody consequences of the Empire’s attempt to control the north. When Vellsberg is attacked, Torny and Ebba entrust themselves to Aisulu, a lone rider from beyond the eastern edges of the Southern Empire. Betrayed and pursued, they flee through a land succumbing to a strange plague. Invisible flames afflict the penitent, and whispers of a new Martyr and his False Disciple follow at their heels. Unwilling to face the things they’ve done to survive, Torny and Ebba find themselves torn apart again. After all, what hope is there, when once you have been monstrous? What peace can there be, when you have betrayed your own?”

More information here. 

Follow

Share

The Asian Canadian Writers’ Workshop (ACWW) is pleased to announce Jinwoo Park winner of the 2020 Jim Wong-Chu Emerging Writers Award for his manuscript The Oxford Soju Club.

The judges say, “Park’s accomplished fiction manuscript is a riveting ‘tale of mystery and intrigue, C.I.A. agents, false identities, betrayal and love, each character committed to their own cause’.”

More details here.

Follow

Share