Creative Writing Competitions to Enter in the New Year

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Bath Flash Fiction Novella in Flash Award, Discoveries 2022 Award, Fish Memoir Contest, Mogford Prize for Food and Drink Writing, Retreat West First Chapter Competition, The Exeter Novel Prize

January is the time for New Year Resolutions which, for writers, will surely involve finishing that novel or winning a writing competition or two…or three. To help concentrate your mind, below are some tempting opportunities – but please note that some of the deadlines are right at the beginning of the month, which is why this post is a few days early.

The Exeter Novel Prize requires the first 10,000 words of a novel not under contract, including a 500-word synopsis. Any genre can be entered, with the exception of children’s. Prizes: £500, 5x£100. Entry fee: £18. Closing date: 1 January. Details: http://www.creativewritingmatters.co.uk

Mogford Prize for Food and Drink Writing for short stories with food and drink themes, up to 2,500 words. Prizes: £10,000m 3x£250. Entry fee: £10. Closing date: 12 January. Details: http://www.mogfordprize.co.uk/

Lucy Cavendish Fiction Prize for the first 40-50 pages of a finished but unpublished novel by a woman writer. Prizes: £1,500. Entry fee: 12. Closing Date 17 January. (Now extended to 12 February) Details: http://www.lucy-cav.cam.ac.uk/fictionprize/

Bath Flash Fiction Novella in Flash Award for flash fiction novellas between 56,00 and 18,000 words. Prizes: £300, 2x£100; publicatin. Entry fee: £16. Closing date: 16 January. Details: https://bathflashfictionaward.com/

Discoveries 2022 Award for novels by female unpublished writers. Prizes: First prize is representation by Curtis Brown Literary Agency and a cash prize of £5,000, plus the opportunity to workshop their manuscript with an Audible commissioning editor specifically matched to their writing style and genre; one promising writer from the shortlist of six will be named Discoveries Scholar and win a free scholarship place to attend a three-month Writing Your Novel course with Curtis Brown, worth £1,800; all shortlisted writers will be offered a mentoring session plus free enrollment on a Curtis Brown Creative six-week online course worth £210; all 16 longlisted authors will be invited to join the two-week online Discoveries Writing Development course, plus receive an annual Audible subscription. Send the first 10,000 words, plus a synopsis of between 500-1,000 words. Entry is free. Deadline 17 January. Details: discoveries.curtisbrowncreative.co.uk/

Retreat West First Chapter Competition for the first chapter of a novel, up to 3,500 words. Prizes: critique and review. Entry fee: £10. Closing date: 31 January. Details: http://www.retreatwest.co.uk

UK Film Festival Script Writing Competitions for 3-minute scripts, 10-minute scrips, feature film scripts. Prizes: winning scripts passed to leading directors. Entry fee: varies with category and date: enter early. Closing dte: 28 January. Details: http://www.ukfilmfestival.com

Lancashire Authors’ Association Flash Fiction Competition for a story in exactly 100 words. Prizes: £100. Entry fee: £2, £5 for three. Closing date: 31 January. Details: http://www.lancashireauthorsassociation.co.uk

Fish Short Memoir Contest for personal non-fiction, up to 4,000 words. Prizes: 1,000 Euros, publication in annual Fish Anthology, a week at Casa Ana Writers retreat in Andalucia and 300 Euros expenses; 200 Euros. Entry fee: 18 Euros Closing date: 31 January. Details: http://www.fishpublishing.com

Please check all entry details with special care. Best of luck!

Barbara Pym and Knitting

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Barbara Pym, Christmas, Knitting

Would Barbara Pym have approved of the local knitted embellishments for our Kentish post boxes? I suspect that she and her characters would have found them ‘not quite the thing’, but in these dark days anything that raises a smile is to be encouraged.

Happy Christmas from all ninevoices!

Last Minute Christmas Books

We are not often given to self-aggrandisement, but hope to be forgiven if we remind you of three novels published by members of ninevoices which might solve a last-minute present need or help entertain a self-isolating friend or relative. You may also like to be reminded that you could send one of them (or even all three) as gifts to their kindle/tablet. All you need is to ask them for their kindle address details.

All Desires Known by Tanya van Hasselt. Forbidden desires. A mind in fragments. A shocking act of violence. Written by a novelist whose work has been compared to that of Alan Bennett.

Currently only £0.99 for the kindle copy from Amazon. https://www.amazon.co.uk/All-Desires-Known-Tanya-Hasselt-ebook/dp/B00IDCH6IQ/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=tanya+van+hasselt&qid=1639936849&s=books&sr=1-1

Of Human Telling by Tanya van Hasselt. A sharp-eyed look at the mysteries of love and obsession by the winner of the Barbara Pym Short Story Award.

Currently only £0.99 from Amazon for the kindle copy. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Human-Telling-Tanya-van-Hasselt-ebook/dp/B01N9BJPNQ/ref=sr_1_2?keywords=tanya+van+hasselt&qid=1639936802&s=books&sr=1-2

The Servant by Maggie Richell-Davies. Inspired by a visit to London’s Foundling Museum, this dark story of the exploitation of vulnerable young women in eighteenth century London won the Historical Writers’ Association Unpublished Novel Award in 2020.

Currently £1.99 for the kindle/tablet copy, or £7.99 for the paperback. Both on https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B087N8H9PB

Happy Christmas reading!

Barbara Pym: when knitting is needed

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Embroidery, Jane Austen, Knitting, Oscar Wilde

‘I wonder if women brought their knitting when Oscar Wilde talked,’ said Piers.

‘I daresay not,’ said Sybil calmly, ‘but that doesn’t mean they wouldn’t have liked to.’

(At a dinner party in Barbara Pym’s novel A Glass of Blessings)

Sybil, the tolerant, perceptive mother-in-law of the heroine Wilmet in A Glass of Blessings, can be relied on. Knitting, embroidery, tapestry, sewing:  these could come to the rescue of women – and men too – on all sorts of occasions. It’s enough to make you envy those Jane Austen heroines who could bend their faces over their work to hide their emotions of irritation or boredom with whatever is going on around them.

Certainly the Lenten service Wilmet attends with its almost never-ending sermon would have been much more bearable if she’d had something to occupy her hands and despairing mind: We had been subjected – that seemed to be the only way to describe it – to an address of great dullness… Sentence after sentence seemed as if it must be the last but still it went on. I felt as if I had been wrapped round and round in a cocoon of wordiness, like a great suffocating eiderdown.

Being a committed Christian and regular churchgoer, Barbara Pym heard a lot of sermons and you can’t help thinking some of them must have found their way into her novels. Did Archdeacon Hoccleve’s Judgment Day sermon in Some Tame Gazelle with its over-flowing stream of literary quotations beginning at the seventeenth century happen in real life? The congregation shifted awkwardly in their seats. It was uncomfortable to be reminded that the Judgment Day might be tomorrow.’ Another occasion for the soothing effect of needlework.

Embroidery can provide the motif for those preachers of sermons, as in Barbara Pym’s early novel Civil to Strangers: ‘Some people don’t put in enough stitches,’ repeated the rector, in a slow emphatic voice. ‘Isn’t that true of many of us? He leaned forward. ‘Aren’t our lives pieces of embroidery that we have to fill in ourselves? Can we truthfully say that we always put in enough stitches?’ Cassandra, the twenty-eight-year-old heroine, wakes up from daydreaming to realize that she is the ‘old lady’ whose embroidered firescreen has inspired the rector’s sermon; Janie, the rector’s good and dutiful daughter, is whiling away the time eyeing up the curate as a possible husband. Barbara Pym knew that even Excellent Women find it impossible to stop their thoughts wandering, and this must be a comfort to all of us.

It’s more than forty years since I started an embroidered cushion cover in a fit of over-enthusiasm and lack of self-knowledge. Somehow it got put away and forgotten, but it’s come out again now. Just the thing for keeping calm when politicians are fighting: I might even finish it. The wife of the President of the Learned Society in Barbara Pym’s Excellent Women knew what she was about, during those endless anthropology lectures, sitting there with her knitting until she nods off to sleep…