MSt tutor Patrick McGuinness has been awarded the Duff Cooper prize for his novel, Other People’s Countries, a Journey into Memory (Jonathan Cape)
“A stunning piece of lyrical writing, rich in narrative and character – full of fresh ways of looking at how we grow up, how we remember, how we start to make sense of the world.”
The Duff Cooper Prize “celebrates the best in non-fiction writing”.
“Narrative and Anti-Narrative in the Short Story and the Novel”
with MSt tutor Alice Jolly
Mawby Room, Kellogg College,
62 Banbury Road
5 pm (refreshments) for 5.30 pm
All are welcome and no bookings are necessary
Alice Jolly has published two novels with Simon and Schuster and four of her plays have been produced by the professional company of the Everyman in Cheltenham. She has been commissioned by Paines Plough and her monologues have been performed at the Tristan Bates Theatre in Covent Garden. She teaches creative writing on the MSt at Oxford University and is currently crowd funding for a memoir which will be published by Unbound in autumn 2015. Alice won the 2014 V. S. Pritchett Memorial Prize awarded by The Royal Society of Literature.
Seminar Convenor: Dr Clare Morgan
MSt alumna Susie Campbell’s collection of prose and collage poems will be launched on 26th February 2015, at Blackwell’s Bookshop in Oxford.
Admission is free but a ticket is necessary. Contact events.oxford@blackwell.co.uk or collect a free ticket in store.
For more information, visit the Blackwell’s Oxford Events webpage.
MSt Director Clare Morgan’s review of Melvyn Bragg’s Grains of Sand appeared in the Times Literary Supplement on the 14th of January 2015
You can read the review here (subscription necessary)
“The Medium of Poetry”
with MSt tutor Emma Jones
Mawby Room, Kellogg College,
62 Banbury Road
5 pm (refreshments) for 5.30 pm
All are welcome and no bookings are necessary
Emma Jones’ first book, The Striped World, was published by Faber & Faber in 2009, was awarded the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the Queensland Premier’s Award for Best Collection, and the Anne Elder Award, and was shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, among others. She has written the libretto for City Songs, a contemporary oratorio, with composer Eriks Esenvalds, which premiered at The Round House in London with vocalist Imogen Heap. Emma has held writing fellowships in Cambridge, the Lake District, Rome and Riga, and is at work on a second book. She tutors in poetry on Oxford’s MSt in Creative Writing.
Seminar Convenor: Dr Clare Morgan
The winner of this year’s AM Heath Prize for fiction by an MSt student is Daisy Johnson.
This prize, offered by one of London’s most prestigious and long-established literary agencies, is awarded annually for the best piece of fiction written by a graduating student of the MSt.
Victoria Hobbs of the AM Heath Agency had this to say about her work:
“Daisy Johnson’s stories are brave and unusual – writing with the very best kind of inventive ambition. From the striking opening image of headless eels in ‘Starver’, to the eerie poise of the fox at the end of ‘There Was A Fox In the Bedroom’, I was hooked. I am very much looking forward to seeing what this writer does next.”
Congratulations, Daisy!
Two Ways To Win A Prize
Alice Jolly
Just recently I won the V. S. Pritchett Memorial Prize which is awarded by the Royal Society of Literature for the best unpublished short story of the year. I have never won a prestigious prize of this kind before and so I was thrilled.
The win was particularly positive for me because only a few weeks before, as I filled out yet another on-line short story competition form, I had been grumbling to myself about the state of my literary career.
‘I’m forty seven years old and I’ve been doing this for twenty years. I don’t want to have to keep sending my work out. By now people should be asking me for it.’ But despite the grumbling, I did send that story off.
And that’s the first important piece of advice I would give to anyone who wants to win a prize. Send your work out. This may sound obvious. It is obvious – but it is also important.
The truth is that many of us write at the level when we will often make it to the long list of forty short stories / poems / plays. After that, whether we win or not is a matter of luck.
So please don’t listen to that voice in your head telling you it is all a waste of time. Submit your story / poem / play to every competition and call for submissions that you can. You will get lucky some time.
My second piece of advice is much more concrete and relates specifically to my winning short story which is called Ray The Rottweiler. Inevitably as soon as I got the call telling me that I had won I asked myself – why that story?
Of course, I don’t know. As I said, statistics and luck are key ingredients. But I did suddenly think of the very talented director who worked on my most recent play. He has a saying which is – big character always succeeds.
That’s worth thinking about. At the centre of my winning story is an eccentric, difficult, puzzling character. Think about novels, stories or plays that you love. Are they inhabited by big characters? Are the characters in your own writing big enough?
As for me, I am hard at work on Derek The Dachshund and Paddy The Poodle.
MSt tutor Tina Pepler’s black comedy about aid workers, “Syria: Bread and Bombs”, which aired from 24th to 28th November, 2014 is now available online.
Tom de Freston talks to Agnes Davis about her entry for the prize, ‘LaLa’.
The winner, decided by judges Melanie Pappenheim, Tom De Freston, John Carey, Rhidian Brook and Philip Gross will be announced at Medicine Unboxed: Frontiers conference on Sunday 23 November.
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