MSt tutor Alice Jolly, winner of the VS Pritchett Prize 2014, reflects on winning

https://www.conted.ox.ac.uk/courses/infosysfiles/_Tutors/Jolly_Alice_4713.jpgTwo 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Just recently I won the V. S. Pritchett Memorial Prize which is awarded by the Royal Society of Literature for the best unpublished short story of the year.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.

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MSt tutor Tina Pepler’s Radio 4 drama series “Syria: Bread and Bombs” available online

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.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04prh8z

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Video: MSt alumna Agnes Davis talks about her entry for the Medicine Unboxed Creative Prize 2014

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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MSt Tutor Wendy Brandmark launches novel, The Stray American. London,13 December 2014

MSt tutor Wendy Brandmark’s new novel The Stray American, will be launched in London on Saturday 13 December at 7.30pm

Venue: October Gallery, 24 Old Gloucester Street, Bloomsbury, London WC1N 3AL.

Cost: Free, but book your places with bernadette@hollandparkpress.co.uk.

The Stray American is set in 2003, and tells the story of Larry Greenberg escapes from his corporate law job in Boston to teach in a seedy American college near London’s Waterloo Station. We follow Larry, a flawed but engaging character, on his journey in search of a soul mate and a sense of purpose.”

More details from Holland Park Press

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MSt Tutor Alice Jolly wins 2014 VS Pritchett prize

MST Tutor Alice Jolly won the 2014 VS Pritchett prize for her short story “Ray the Rottweiler”. The prize is awarded by the Royal Society of Literature for the best unpublished story of the year. This year’s judges were Dame Margaret Drabble, Tibor Fischer and Helen Oyeyemi.

The story will also be published in Prospect online and the RSL Review.

More at http://rslit.org/v-s-pritchett

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MSt alumna Kent DePinto’s produces BBC Radio 4’s “Has the Book a Future?”

Has the Book a Future?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b040lpgz

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MSt tutor Emma Jones on ‘Next Generation 2014’ list of poets

Once every decade, the  Poetry Book Society recognises “the 20 most exciting new poets from the UK and Ireland”. MSt tutor Emma Jones the ‘Next Generation 2014’ list:

 

http://poetrybooks.co.uk/projects/51/

and
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/sep/11/next-generation-20-poets-poetry-book-society-kate-tempest

 

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Kellogg College Creative Writing Seminar Series: : Elleke Boehmer, 28 October 2014

The World in a Grain of Sand”: Writing Shorter and Longer Narrative

Michaelmas Term Week 3
Thursday 28th October 2014
5 pm (refreshments) for 5.30 pm

Kellogg College Centre for Creative Writing
Mawby Room, Kellogg College,62 Banbury Road.

All are welcome and no bookings are necessary.

Elleke Boehmer is a novelist, critic and Professor of English at Oxford University specialising in African and Indian literatures in English. She is the author of four novels, including Screens again the Sky (shortlisted for the David Higham Prize, 1990), Bloodlines (shortlisted for the SANLAM prize, 2000), and Nile Baby (2008). She has published monographs, editions and anthologies, amongst others, Colonial and Postcolonial Literature (1995, 2005) and Stories of Women (2005). Her biography Nelson Mandela (2008) has been widely translated and her edition of Robert Baden-Powell’s Scouting for Boys was a 2004 bestseller. She is Professor of World Literature in English at the University of Oxford, and Professorial Governing Body Fellow at Wolfson College. In 2014-5, she will serve as a judge for the Man Booker International Prize.

Seminar Convenor: Dr Clare Morgan

http://www.kellogg.ox.ac.uk/researchcentres/CW

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Kellogg College Creative Writing Seminar Series: Thomas Glave, 27 November 2014

Secretive Women, Taboos and Dangerous Sex
Michaelmas Term Week 7
Thursday 27th November 2014
5 pm (refreshments) for 5.30 pm

Kellogg College Centre for Creative Writing
Mawby Room, Kellogg College,62 Banbury Road.

All are welcome and no bookings are necessary

Thomas Glave was born in the Bronx and grew up there and in Kingston, Jamaica.  He is the author of Whose Song? and Other Stories, Words to Our Now: Imagination and Dissent (Lambda Literary Award, 2005), The Torturer’s Wife (Dayton Literary Peace Prize finalist and Lambda Literary Award finalist, 2008) and Among the Bloodpeople: Politics and Flesh (2013), recently named a 2014 Lambda Literary Award finalist.  He is editor of the anthology Our Caribbean: A Gathering of Lesbian and Gay Writing from the Antilles (Lambda Literary Award, 2008). Glave has been Martin Luther King, Jr. Visiting Professor at MIT, a 2012 Visiting Fellow at Clare Hall, Cambridge, and is a 2014 Leverhulme Visiting Professor in the University of Warwick’s Dept. of Hispanic Studies and in the Yesu Persaud Centre for Caribbean Studies.

Seminar Convenor: Dr Clare Morgan

http://www.kellogg.ox.ac.uk/researchcentres/CW

 

 

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Conference: Women Writing Across Cultures: Past, Present and Future, 26 – 28 September 2014

An international conference at St Hilda’s College, University of Oxford Friday 26 September to Sunday 28 September 2014.

Organized by the ‘What is Women’s Writing?’ Interdisciplinary Research Group, supported and funded by The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH).

This symposium aims to foster dialogue among researchers and practitioners dealing with women’s writing in a variety of fields: transnational writing and writing across cultures; writing across academic disciplines, across the humanities and social sciences, across the arts and sciences; encounters between the critical and the creative, the academic and the popular, art and life, history and life-writing, orality and literacy, collective and individual authorship, analysant and analyst; crossing temporal boundaries: women’s writing of the past impacting on the present, imagining futures for women’s writing.
Full Registration – £80.00
Concession Registration (graduate/unwaged/independent researcher) – £40.00

Conference website with programme ,  online registration and booking.

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