Escalator Literature Novel Writing Competition Winners - 2011/12
Looking For The Best New Writing Talent? The Escalator Literature Winners 2012
The ten talented writers below were selected in January 2012 to take part in a year’s worth of development and support as part of the Escalator Literature programme. Their skills will be honed this year through professional development and mentoring support, culminating in a showcase event in London in September 2012.
Agents and publishers are habitually impressed by the standard of the writers going through Escalator Literature, and many former winners have been picked up by agents and publishers. Previous winners include Helen Ivory, Paddy Tarrant, Fraser Grace, Aliya Whiteley, Nicola Upson, Ruth Dugdall, Susan Sellers, Elizabeth Ferretti and Guy Saville.
This year’s writers are an exciting mix of novelists. Many are published in other genres and are graduates from impressive writing programmes. They have all been chosenby our
judges and mentors: Tobias Hill, Joanna Hines, Bernardine Evaristo, Katharine McMahon and Michelle Spring.
Do browse the Escalator winners’ biographies and work, and if you would like to contact us about getting in touch with a writer then email
info@writerscentrenorwich.org.uk
Rebecca Atkinson
I am a freelance writer and journalist. I have previously written articles and short stories for publications including The Guardian, Weekend, Vogue and Marie Claire. I have written scripts for BBC television, two half hour screenplays produced by Mutt and Jeff productions for the Community Channel and a stage play for Deafinately Theatre, at Soho Theatre.
I am currently working on my novel Collecting Faces - a story of love and sight loss in London, based on my former Guardian Weekend column, 'Losing Sight, Still Looking'.
Download an extract from Collecting Faces.
Elaine Bishop
I grew up in Coventry and trained as a journalist after leaving school. In 1989, I became Group Editor of Mid-Anglia Newspapers; the company’s first female editor and, at 25, its youngest. I have a first class honours degree in Writing and English and in November 2011 graduated with Distinction from the Creative Writing MA programme at Anglia Ruskin University. I have been writing a collection of short stories and am currently working on my first novel. I live near Cambridge with my husband and our three children.
Armando Celayo
Though my folks are from Mexico, I was born and raised in Oklahoma. I moved to England a few years ago to attend the Creative Writing MA at the University of East Anglia, where I received a Distinction, was a finalist for the Curtis Brown Award, and was awarded the Prose Fiction MA Prize. My journalism has appeared in PEN International and World Literature Today, where I regularly review books.
My novel, For the Recovery of Lost Things, focuses on Dolores Moreno: patient mother, stern sister, loyal friend, reluctant mistress. Spanning from the 1960s to the 2030s, from northern Mexico to the Great Plains of America to East Anglia, my novel explores the immigrant experience—its conflicts, its tragedies and joys, and the endurance it requires.
Guinevere Glasfurd-Brown
I am from the north of England and moved south with my baby daughter in 2001. I now live on the edge of the Fens, near Cambridge. Last year, I graduated with a Distinction from the MA Creative Writing, Anglia Ruskin University. My stories have appeared in
Mslexia and
The Scotsman, and in a collection published by the National Galleries of Scotland. In 2011, I completed a writing programme with Faber Academy, London, tutored by the novelist, Louise Doughty. I am currently working on my first novel,
X Y Z, a novel about love, death and mathematics set in the 17thC Dutch Republic.
X Y Z tells the story of Helena Jans Van der Strom and the unseen relationship she had with René Descartes. I can be followed on twitter at
@guingb
BTI Larsson
I’m originally Swedish and Icelandic, but I was raised trilingual and moved between Scandinavia and the U.S. nine times in my youth. As an adult, I added Scotland and England to the mix. Professionally, I’ve spent my time working with at-risk and offending youth as an ESL teacher, a conflict mediator, an advocate for survivors of sexual assault, and a PhD researcher. In 2009, I was awarded the Charles Pick Fellowship at the University of East Anglia, which permitted me to focus on my fiction full time for a while. I’m currently finishing a novel set in northern Sweden about the murder of a young boy and the children in his class, narrated by the boy’s schoolteacher.
K.J. Packer
I have held a strong passion for writing for over twenty-five years, and have pursued this love periodically throughout that time. I am interested in the theme of transience, in particular the experiences of people leading nomadic lives, or living in otherwise impermanent circumstances.
The novel I am currently writing is Ring Master, a story of family betrayal set around the Victorian travelling fairs, and focusing on the life of a female high rope walker.
When fair weather permits, I write in an old caravan on the edge of a watery meadow not far from the North Norfolk coast – and I also love swimming, cycling and barn owls.
Teresa Rogers
I was born, bred and educated in Norfolk. I think my family were probably deposited here during the last glaciation. I have worked in shops, delivered the mail and ridden shotgun on a mobile library. I am currently employed in horticulture. About five years ago I found that writing was a compulsion I could no longer ignore. At that point, enthusiastic and clueless, I started a novel. When the isolation began to get to me, I enrolled on a diploma course at the UEA and learned some hard but valuable lessons by exposing my work to others for the first time. I am currently writing my second book which is, I’m sure no one will be surprised to learn, set in Norfolk. Although perhaps not Norfolk as you think you know it…
Erin Soros
My work travels between creative writing, academic research and community advocacy. I grew up in Vancouver, where I was a rape crisis counsellor and a coordinator of literacy programs for marginalized youth. Collaborative projects with First Nations elders prompted an interest in my own oral history, and I began recording the life stories of retired loggers up and down the BC coast. This history inspired a turn toward fiction: I moved to New York to complete an MFA in Writing at Columbia University, where I designed and taught courses that explored philosophy in relation to social justice. I am now pursuing a PhD at the UEA, teaching human rights, psychoanalysis, and literature while analyzing the testimony of collective and individual trauma.
My fiction and non-fiction have been published in international journals and anthologies, most recently in West Coast Line, in a special issue devoted to Canadian fiction. Stories have also been aired on the CBC and BBC—as a finalist for the BBC Short Story Award and as winner of the CBC Literary Award and the Commonwealth Prize for the Short Story. My novel-in-progress, Hook Tender, is set in an immigrant logging camp during the Second World War. A collection of prose and photographs, Morning is Vertical, is forthcoming in 2012 from Rufus Books.
Shereen Tadros
I started making up stories before I could hold a pen and have never stopped. After an adolescence spent writing embarrassing poetry, I spent several years concentrating on my medical career. I now work as a doctor at London’s Great Ormond Street Hospital, where I spend far too much time being terrified by the resident clowns. Over the last year (in response to a dare), I have been busy rekindling my love of telling stories and so I feel very excited to be able to take part in the Escalator scheme this year. I am currently working on my first novel, which follows a young boy growing up in Alexandria in the 1950s, around the time of what has now become known as the first Egyptian Revolution.
Kate Worsley
I was born in Lancashire, studied English at UCL, and worked for many years in London as a national newspaper and magazine journalist, writing a non-fiction book for Conran Octopus along the way. When I moved to the east coast I started to write fiction. In 2008, soon after my third child was born, I started City University’s MA Fiction (Novels) and was lucky enough to secure Sarah Waters as my personal tutor. Having finished my first novel SHE RISES last year – a transgressive 18th-century adventure – I am now represented by Véronique Baxter at David Higham Associates and at work on my second novel FOXASH, which is set on a 1930s land settlement.
Commended Writers
Simon Coard
My name is Simon Coard, although I produce work under the name ‘Sniffer’, and I am a writer, artist and performer based in Cambridge. I am a recent graduate of Anglia Ruskin University, leaving with a First Class Degree with Honours in Writing and Drama. Whilst there I won the McLeod Prize, awarded to the student with the highest overall grade for a joint honours degree, and the Anglia Ruskin Fiction Prize in 2010 with the short story O – described by Booker Prize nominee Ali Smith as ‘rich, unafraid, haunting and very well-handled’. My current project, the conceptual memoir Mañana, has been described as ‘an astonishing project, demonstrating a masterful control of register as it modulates through intensely subjective and highly detached articulations of pain, isolation, creativity and anomie’. My writing style in general is taut and minimalist, dealing with taboo issues with extreme candour. I often experiment with choric devices, aesthetics and form.
Paul Davenport-Randell
Born, (well) bred, and educated in Norwich, I have travelled to many a far-flung place, and in Israel more than twenty years ago, started writing prose fiction. My first novel, Controversy, remains rightfully unpublished, and its towers of drafts, along with many more columns of short stories, occupies much-needed attic and cupboard space. In 2008 I graduated from the (since) rebranded Norwich University College of the Arts with a first in Creative Writing (BAhon). I have had two short stories published in Veto (2007 and 2008), and a third in a publicity booklet for the Norwich Castle Museum. For the last three years, and when time and six-year-old daughter allowed, I’ve been researching and working on a second novel, Warpaint; and if time and six-year old daughter allow, it will be finished much before three more have passed.
Mary Jane Riley
I wrote my first story on my newly acquired blue Petite typewriter. I was eight. It was about a gang of children who had adventures on mysterious islands, but I soon realised Enid Blyton had cornered that particular market. So I wrote about the Wild West instead. When I grew up I had to earn a living, so became a BBC radio presenter, now, living in Suffolk, I write for its news website. Then, in true journalistic style, I decided not to let the facts get in the way of a good story and got creative. I wrote for women’s magazines and small presses. I formed WriteOutLoud with two writer friends to help charities get their message across using life writing. Then I wrote a book, got an agent…. and learned about the harsh realities of the publishing world. I’m hoping that world will like my second psychological thriller better.