Novel Pitch

If you wish to book for Novel Pitch please pay on the door, online booking has now closed.

You walk into a bookshop, your novel lies in glimmering piles as you sit calmly behind the table and prepare to sign…

Bring this dream a step closer by entering Novel Pitch.

Novel Pitch gives 6 unpublished authors the chance to pitch their novel to a panel of experts from the publishing and literary world at a unique live event.

Panelists:
Juliette Mitchell - Penguin
Peter Straus - Rogers, Coleridge & White Literary Agency
Caroline McCarthy - The Literary Consultancy
Ellah Allfrey - Random House
Nii Parkes - Flipped Eye

Each finalist will get feedback from the panel and ideas for next steps.

The winner will receive a professional reading of their work.

To submit
Please send a 2000 word extract form your novel or work in progress, plus a synopsis of no more than 300 words (12 point font, typed and double spaced) to Spread the Word. Deadline: Monday 2nd March 2009.
Send submissions to annette@spreadtheword.org.uk
Submission is free.

Novel Pitch Live Final
Come along to the live final if you’re interested in hearing top tips from the experts or would like to put your own key questions to the panel. You could also try your luck at the open-mic slot and pitch your writing for quickfire advice.

Saturday 25 April
11am-4pm
Stratford Circus
Theatre Square
London E15 1BX

Tube: Stratford

£7/£5 (concessions)

Juliette Mitchell is an Editor at Penguin Books. She studied Modern Languages at Oxford University and Twentieth-Century English Literature at Sussex University, and then lived and worked abroad before joining Penguin in 1999. She works on Penguin’s Hamish Hamilton imprint – a small and very literary list which brings together the new and the established from home and abroad. Hamish Hamilton authors include Zadie Smith, Dave Eggers, Hari Kunzru, Paul Theroux, Jonathan Safran Foer, Mohsin Hamid, Alain de Botton, Noam Chomsky and W. G. Sebald.

Peter Straus joined Rogers, Coleridge and White in 2002. He has been in the book world for over twenty years and has worked at Hodder & Stoughton, Hamish Hamilton and Macmillan. He was the publisher of Picador for twelve years and latterly the Editor in Chief of all the adult trade imprints at Macmillan, in his time there working with such authors as Don De Lillo, Helen Fielding, Cormac McCarthy, V.S.Naipaul, and Michael Ondaatje. His client list includes Kate Atkinson, Carol Ann Duffy, Mariella Frostrup, Rachel Johnson, Kate Long, Alexander Masters, Don Paterson, Jenny Pitman, Adam Thirlwell, Rupert Thomson and Colm Toibin. He lives in London.

Nii Ayikwei Parkes is co-founder and senior editor at flipped eye publishing, a leading independent press. He had his first editorial role in 1988, working on his school magazine, The Achimotan. Three years later, at seventeen, he co-founded filla! Magazine – Ghana's first student-run national magazine – and left a year later to study in Manchester. Since his return to writing and editing in 2001, Nii has held residencies at the University of Southampton and California State University, Los Angeles, where he was an advisor on the university's magazine, Statement. In 2007 he was awarded Ghana's National ACRAG award for poetry and literary advocacy. He holds an MA in Creative Writing from Birkbeck and is a contributing editor to The Liberal.