Meet Our TLC Free Reads Winners 2011
Welcome to the TLC (The Literary Consultancy) Free Reads project page.
About TLC Free Reads
The opportunity is open to writers resident in the East of England who write prose (fiction, non-fiction, short stories) poetry, and scripts for TV, Film, Radio or Theatre.
The Winners
This year we had six winners. We look forward to showcasing their writing once it’s been through the TLC treatment. We hope to post in the New Writing section of the WCN website, and we will also post links here on the project page. In the meantime you can view biographies, synopses of their work, and photos from five of the winners, below.
If you think a manuscript reading giving you sage industry advice and honest, constructive feedback would help you progress then do sign-up to our e-news service on the top-left of this page to receive first notice of when you can apply for our next Free Reads scheme.
James Anderson
LEFT THINGS LATE1919, winter, a badly built cabin on the Thelon River, Canada. Inside three men are dying: a supposedly experienced Barrens explorer, a returned soldier, and the former lover of the soldier’s wife.
Irishman Jack Butler recalls meeting Sarah Underhill the year before in the near-desert along the Thompson River. She takes him to Footner, a preserve of English custom in the Colonies, its second sons and half-pay officers enlisted at the call of the Mother Country. Jack and Sarah’s affair begins.
But the Great War ends and soldiers, wounded or whole but all changed, return. Jack, now rejected, hates where he once loved, and begins to work towards the husband’s death and Sarah’s devastation.
The relationship of Jack and Sarah throws into relief a society clinging to a way of life already doomed. Everyone, Jack not least, must change or perish. This is a story of love and hatred amid a clash of race, culture and class, and the question of how to know the worth of what you have before it is gone.
BIOGRAPHY
I was born in Northern Ireland but I’ve lived in Norwich since coming to UEA in 1989. I’ve been a Brian MacMahon Short Story Award winner, an Escalator winner, a runner up in the Michael McLaverty Short Story Awards, and on Short Story Radio.
The age-old interaction of Ireland and England and the rise and fall of the British Empire are themes that engross me, but not nearly as much as the emotions and relationships that play out against these backgrounds.
Tista Austin
In my poetry I write on personal and classical themes; I’m interested in French and Russian poetry, and influenced by visual art and archaeology. The work I’m submitting to The Literary Consultancy is a selection of poems from a collection I am hoping to put forward for publication. They are mostly short lyric pieces – dramatic dialogues or narratives addressing issues of femininity, identity and history, – responding to experiences in travel and family relationships. I’ve recently been trying to work towards a freer expressionism with experiments in line and form, and exploring intersections between poetry and verse.
Free Reads is a great opportunity to have some constructive guidance on revising my poems and focus the direction of my work with professional criticism.
BIOGRAPHY
Tista Austin lives with her two children beside a working water mill in Cambridgeshire. She studied Classics at UCL and did an MA in Literature. She’s traveled in Asia and Eastern Europe, was a bookseller for several years but is now an English teacher. She was shortlisted for a New Writing Ventures Award for Fiction in 2007 and published in 2009 in the Legend Writing Awards anthology Six of the Best.
Tracy Ann Baines
Scarred - a Young Adult novel.
When life’s betrayed you, who can you trust? Who can you rely on?
Fifteen-year-old, Ant, relies on himself. He keeps food in the cupboard and looks after his ten-year-old brother, Squit. His dad has died, his mum has spiralled down into depression, and all Ant wants is to keep his brother safe.
But Ant’s on the edge. In the world he inhabits, lines of morality become blurred and he’s haunted by thoughts of death and other dark, disturbing secrets. But when he meets, Skye, a sixteen-year-old run-away, he sees a kindred spirit. Perhaps redemption can be found? Perhaps they’ve both found someone they can finally trust?
As their friendship blossoms, they try to escape into a private world away from their old lives. But fate conspires against them. When the hunt for a serial killer begins and Squit runs away, events start to spiral out of control.
With Squit’s life in the balance and with gun at his head, Ant has to think fast. In a final showdown, Ant must decide - will he do whatever it takes to make sure his little brother is safe? No matter what the truth might be.
BIOGRAPHY
Tracy is an aspiring children’s and YA author.
Her first novel, Pig-Boy & the Quest for the Cinnamon Forest, received an Honorary Mention in the 2008 SCBWI-BI Undiscovered Voices competition and was longlisted in Cornerstones Wow Factor. Her children’s fantasy, Escape From Above, was chosen as a promising entry in the 2011 Times/Chicken House competition and an extract published on The Times website.
Tracy worked in a film art departments for several years but now focuses on her writing. Self-taught, Tracy writes across the age ranges and is keen to pursue her ambition of finding an agent and publisher.
Joanna Guthrie
Hurricane Season is a tale of fragility and oddness, told against the eccentric and beguiling backdrop of the Florida Keys - the chain of islands which are the Southernmost outpost of the USA, reaching down only 70 miles short of Cuba. In 2001, I spent seven months working in a mental health facility there, and started writing about the people I worked with and the place where I found myself - I found myself falling under the spell of both of them.
This writing evolved into a book which is part-memoir, part-history, part-multiple biography, part-travelogue. The overriding themes are of fragility in its myriad and overlapping forms. What underscores the atmosphere of the book is the fact that, although we didn’t know it, we were all in the lead-up to September 11.
BIOGRAPHY
Joanna Guthrie was born in London in 1970, and brought up on the Norfolk-Suffolk border. She has been published as a poet for the last 14 years. In 2005, she completed an MA in Creative Writing at the University of Exeter. Her first collection of poetry, Billack’s Bones, was published by The Rialto in 2007: “An astonishing new voice” – Catherine Smith; “Tenderness and depth and understanding...that commands admiration” – George Szirtes.
In 2006, Hurricane Season was one of three works-in-progress short-listed in the Creative Non-Fiction category of New Writing Partnership’s New Writing Ventures which was judged by William Fiennes and Ali Smith, among others. It was subsequently awarded grants from the Arts Council and the Society of Authors, which enabled its completion. She is currently working on her second collection of poetry, and has just been commissioned to write a series of poems towards a choral piece about the Blyth and Waveney Valleys, in conjunction with the composer Karen Wimhurst and The Voice Project, to be performed in 2012.
Tina Meyer
Synopsis/brief info
The idea for the novel to be submitted to TLC came from an Arvon Course led by Mark Haddon and William Fiennes, when the group were set an exercise to write about a character who had a superpower. The main character of the novel believes that he can see the future and describes his visions, while telling the reader about his job recording deaths in an office next to a sweetshop. The voice for the character and a sense of his visions came out of this first exercise at Arvon. The novel, which has a contemporary setting, was developed through workshops on the postgraduate certificate course at UEA. This is Tina’s first novel.
BIOGRAPHY
Tina Meyer first started writing when she worked as a volunteer at the Wordsworth Trust in Grasmere and joined the weekly writing group led by the poet in residence. Since then she has been on two Arvon courses and attended local writing groups. She has lived in Suffolk for the last four years and recently completed the postgraduate certificate in constructing a novel at UEA.