Writing Competitions to Enter in June

The creative arts are suffering because of lock-down, though one can fortunately still watch and admire favourite actors on IPlayer and box sets. Books, of course, are always there for us, and those who write should surely be taking advantage of more time at their keyboards. (As the more cynical of you of will suspect, this paragraph is simply an excuse to use a picture of a certain Fleabag actor.)

To more serious matters:

An anthology of non-fiction, short stories and poetry is being put together by Printed Words with all profits going to Macmillan Cancer Support. Submissions are limited to UK residents and a limited number of reprints will be considered, although previously unpublished work is preferred. The maximum word count for non-fiction and short stories is 2,000 words, with a maximum of 50 lines for poetry. A biography of up to 100 words is required and the deadline is 15 June. Printed Words is a quarterly non-profit zine and print magazine which has a £20 prize for one writer in each issue. Details: http://www.amandasteelwriter.com/440793822

Grindstone Literary have two competitions currently on offer, both with a 28 June deadline. A Novel Prize for up to 3,000 words, plus a 300 word synopsis. And a Flash Fiction Prize for 500 words. The former has prizes of £1,000, £500 and 4x£50; the latter, prizes of £500, £20, and 4x£50. The Novel Competition has an £18 entry fee, the Flash Fiction Competition £6 entry fee. Details from: grindstoneliterary.com

Farnham Flash Fiction Competition for up to 500 words on any subject. Prizes: £75, £25, £25 for best entry featuring Farnham. Entry fee: £5. Closing date: 5 June. Details: http://www.farnhamfringefestival.org

Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize for poetry (up to five poems), fiction and life writing up to 3,000 words. Prizes: £1,000 in each category, plus publiction in Wasafiri. Entry fee: £10 for one category, £16 for two categories. Closing date: 15 June. Details: wasafiri.org/new-writing-prize/

Hastings Literary Festival Writing Competition. Short stories up to 2,500 words, short stories by BAME writers, up to 5,000 words, poems up to 40 lines, and flash fiction up to 500 words. Prizes: £200, £100, £50 in each category, plus a bespoke writer’s surgery for best entry from a Sussex writer. Entry fee: £7.50, £5 for each subsequent entry. Deadline was 7 June, HOWEVER, THIS SADLY APPEARS TO HAVE BEEN CANCELLED because of lock down considerations.

Bath Flash Fiction Award. A thrice-yearly competition for flash fiction up to 300 words. Prizes: £1,000, £300, £100, 2X£30. Entry fee: £9. Current closing date: 16 June. Details: http://www.bathflashfictionaward.com

British Czech & Slovak Association prize for short stories and non-fiction, up to 2,000 words, exploring links between Britain and the Szech/Slovac Republics at any time. The suggested, but optional, theme for 2020 is ‘sporting’. Prizes: £400, £150, publication in the British Czech & Slovak Review. Free entry. Closing date: 30 June. Details: bcsa.co.uk/competitions/

Henshaw Short Story Competition. A quarterly competition for short stories up to 2,000 words, on any theme. Prizes: £200, £100, £50. Entry fee: £6. Current closing date: 30 June. These are lovely people who not only support writers, and offer a helpful critique, if wanted, but have sent all profits since September 2019 to Medecins sans Frontiers. A few years back, a member of ninevoices managed to not only win this, but get her story into their anthology – so it can be done. Details: henshawpress.co.uk

Impress Prize for New Writers. Full-length debuts from unpublished fiction and non-fiction writers. Submit a book proposal and sample chapter totaling no more than 6,000 words. Prizes: £500 and publication by Impress Books. Entry fee: £25. Closing date: 30 June. Details: http://www.impress-books.co.uk

Wells Festival of Literature – short stories between 1,000 and 2,000 words; poems up to 35 lines; stories for children (first three chapters); young poets, up to 35 lines. Prizes: £1,000, £500, £250, £100 local prize; £750, £300, £200, £100 local prize, in poetry and children’s categories; £150, £75, £50 in young poets’ category. Entry fee: £6 each category; £3 for young poets. Closing date: 30 June. Details: http://www.wellsfestivalofliterature.org.uk

Everything is topsy-turvey at the moment, so PLEASE check the above details with care before trying to enter anything. Some competitions are being cancelled, others have their deadlines altered.

Good luck!

The Stress-Free Way to Attend a Literary Festival

I’ve never been to a literary festival, though I have often meant to do so. Yesterday, however, a neighbour drew our attention to fact that the 33rd edition of the Hay Festival, usually held in Powys, is being broadcast free online this week.

This meant that last night we were enthralled to share in a discussion with Maggie O’Farrell about her recently released, and much applauded, Hamnet – an imagined take on the death of Shakespeare’s young son and how it might have affected the playwright’s life and work.

DO PLEASE GO AND TAKE A LOOK: hayfestival.com/wales/bbc

There are many other other treasures to share: poetry readings, ballet, discussions on the science of corona virus. Stephne Fry being erudite about Ancient Greece. All free – though the festival organisers do hint for a donation. But Maggie is probably the highlight for anyone with an interest in historical fiction or, for that matter, quality fiction of any kind.

I was particularly taken by her tale of the difficulties of writing a fraught emotional scene while sharing a household with noisy and intrusive family members. Her solution? To spend two hours hidden inside her children’s Wendy House, accompanied only by her her cat. It worked a treat, apparently.

Being confined at home with one’s family can, of course, be challenging. Young children will need to be home-schooled or entertained. Older ones found space where they can continue to be gainfully-employed on-line. Partners will need to be placated at being abandoned in favour of a laptop and fistful of editing notes. But, as Maggie proved, a way can always be found.

And for those creative people who are completely isolated from their nearest and dearest, just remember that the artist Lowry once confided to a friend: ‘Had I not been lonely I would not have seen what I did.’

Put your isolation to creative use. And find something to watch from the Wye Festival.

 

 

Behaving Badly – and Barbara Pym

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Barbara Pym, Barbara Pym Society, Behaving Badly, Catherine Heath, Green Leaves, Judi Dench, St Hilda's College Oxford

‘I could hardly make a big production of it, you know… when he told me, about how he’d spent the night with some girl called Rebecca, all I could think of was the fact that I’d bought turbot for supper…’

Catherine Heath’s fifth and final novel Behaving Badly gives us one of the most brilliantly-conceived comic heroines ever. Published in 1984, it is somehow perfect escapist reading for today, taking us to a past which feels in retrospect to have been more innocent and less complicated.

‘I was going to do Hollandaise sauce, and I thought, oh dear, our lovely dinner’s going to be quite wasted. So when he told me about this girl I just said, oh, yes, I see. Oh, thank you for telling me. And that was all and we ate the turbot and do you know I quite enjoyed it… So I mean, there’s no point in putting on a tragic act. It stands to reason that nobody, nobody that greedy has much dignity to stand on.’

Fifty-year-old Bridget Mayor has dutifully filled her life with hobbies, television and church-going after her husband dumped her five years earlier to marry a much younger woman. Nothing very unusual about that for women in seventies Britain. But what happens when an Excellent Woman stops being excellent and decides she will start pleasing herself instead of other people? What’s the point in clinging to dignity? To her husband’s horrified discomfiture Bridget insists on moving back into her old home in Hampstead, where her devious ex-mother-in-law Frieda conspires to get rid of the intruder Rebecca. But that’s just the start…

Writing in The Times, Isabel Raphael wrote of Behaving Badly: Here is an exceptional novel, brisk and unsentimental, touching and subtly romantic. It is also very funny. Her style is poised and cool and her dialogue as artfully artless as that of Barbara Pym; and there is no higher praise in novels of this kind.

There are connections between the two novelists Barbara Pym (1913-1980) and Catherine Heath (1924-1991): both studied English Literature at St Hilda’s College Oxford, both seamlessly combine wit, satire and sympathy, and both died of cancer aged sixty-six. But it’s disappointing that Catherine Heath remains relatively unknown. In the Barbara Pym Society’s publication Green Leaves of November 1998 Hazel K. Bell wrote how she hoped that Catherine Heath’s wonderful novels would one day be rescued from obscurity, in the same way as Barbara Pym’s have been.

That hasn’t happened, despite Judi Dench’s superb performance as Bridget in the 1989 British television series of Behaving Badly, now available as a DVD. If only they would show it again!

Behaving Badly clearly isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. It will seem too dated for some, too much a piece of social history, even too trivial. But for others it’s an altogether delightful read where favourite lines can be relished over and over again: Upstairs Frieda closed a detective story. It was useless. She had no access to South American arrow poison. And as one character says near the end, using a very Barbara Pymish word, ‘Isn’t it, in a way, splendid?’

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Stay Close to Home – and Write Something

 

Just a reminder on this Bank Holiday weekend to stay close to home, and maybe read in the garden. Or, even better, settle down in a canvas chair, with a coffee, and write an amusing short story, or the first chapter of your new novel.

As a reminder, and to make you smile in these troubled times, this is one of the winning entries in a Speldhurst Village Scarecrow Competition back in 2010 when we were struggling with the Swine ‘Flu epidemic.

A Day in the Life of a Newly Published Author – OR – Never Trust an Author Photo

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The Servant by Maggie Richell-Davies

I was discombobulated a few days ago by a request from a writing magazine for a high-resolution author photograph. In the middle of a lock-down. Without access to a hairdresser to perform miracles on my shaggy locks and greying partings. With the application of make-up a distant memory. Unreasonable, or what?

However, with existing pictures unsuitable, I tarted myself up, dragged some smartish outfits from the back of the wardrobe, and press-ganged my husband to come up with a shot of me looking like a serious (and reasonably groomed) writer.

Words were exchanged:

Don’t scowl.

I’m trying to look serious and thoughtful.

And failing. For goodness sake, squeeze out a smile.

But the article is to promote a book on a dark subject. Why would I be grinning like a maniac?

Oh, for goodness sake…!

After much marital wrangling, the deed was done and I sent the best of the pictures to a techno-knowledgeable friend to confirm it was of sufficiently high-resolution before climbing gratefully back into my comfortable tat. Job done.

Useless, the patient friend reported back. You need a less geriatric camera and/or smartphone.

With such extravagant purchases out of lock-down reach, I slid along to an obliging neighbour’s garden, where her son-in-law stood with me in the pouring rain and took some socially-distanced shots with his fancy camera. Result!

Ian (I will spare his blushes by concealing the surname) must have a magic camera, because the resulting picture bears little resemblance to the woman sitting at this keyboard. But I am not about to complain…

Vanity, vanity. All is vanity.

The Servant: A Review

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Historical fiction, Just published, London's Foundling Hospital Museum, Maggie, Review

This month marks the publication of The Servant, an historical novel by ninevoices’ own Maggie Richell-Davies. Inspired by the author’s visit to the Foundling Hospital Museum in London and set in the latter half of the 18th century, The Servant tells the story of Hannah, the orphaned daughter of a silk weaver forced into service at the age of 15. At first Hannah is employed in the safe and nurturing home of a widow, Mistress Buttermere. But when circumstances change, she is obliged to move to the sinister Chalke household where, in addition to hard work and cruelty, she encounters mystery, villainy and danger.

The Foundling Hospital’s clients were largely from the servant class, women who had little in the way of education, even less in the way of rights, and were therefore ripe for exploitation, as Hannah’s story in The Servant so vividly illustrates. The author shows with sometimes excruciating period detail the difficult lives of housemaids, cooks, beggars, and fallen women. For example, when desperate circumstances force Hannah to leave the Chalkes, she is led by her friend and co-worker to the only relatively safe lodgings she can afford: ‘We reach a stinking network of courtyards, washing frozen into ragged shapes on sagging ropes, and stop before a derelict house. Wooden planks are nailed over most of the windows… Inside, the stench is like a buffet in the face and I bite the edge of my shawl to stop my stomach heaving… damp mottles the walls as if they have a scabrous disease.’

The novel is beautifully (‘The sky is pewter rubbed with sharp sand.’) and economically written with strong characterizations. Hannah’s first sighting of Mistress Chalke in the opening pages fills us with dread: ‘…the visitor is ramrod straight. Hands twisting like snakes in the lap of her black gown…The eyes…sharp as a skinning knife.’

Despite the peril and powerlessness of her position, Hannah finds reserves of strength and ingenuity to both survive and act to bring about justice. In this she is aided by Peg, as downtrodden a scullery maid as ever there was, and other women who act in defiance of men’s control. My favourite of these is Fat Nellie, a wise and strong-minded woman who minds children in the lodging next to Hannah’s and provides practical assistance without expectation of return. I’d have liked to see more of Nellie, especially at the end of the book.

Unlike most women of her class, Hannah can read and write. Her intellectual curiosity endears her to farmer Thomas, a thoughtful and well-read widower who delivers milk to the Chalke household. It also drives her to discover the nature of the Chalke’s villainy and seek to end it.

All in all this is a satisfying novel rich in historical detail with a sympathetic heroine battling to survive the injustices of the age.

The Servant, which won the Historical Writers’ Association 2020 Unpublished Novel Award, is available via Amazon on Kindle at a very affordable £2.99, and paperback at £7.99. 

Stay Close to Home…

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black cats, Write a good book.

                                STAY CLOSE TO HOME and SUPPORT THE NHS.

In these difficult times our four-legged friends are a great comfort. I don’t have any pictures of kittens to make you smile, but here is Gizzie, one of my prime beta-readers, admiring her garden. My very own lucky black cat.

Stay close to home. Read a good book. Better still, write a good book that others will one day enjoy…

And if you like to share pictures of your furry friends with us, please feel free. They will make us smile.