Life Writing
Prize

Blake Morrison is the Patron of the Life Writing Prize, and was a judge in its inaugural year in 2017. Blake Morrison was born in Skipton, Yorkshire, and educated at Nottingham University, McMaster University and University College, London. After working for the Times Literary Supplement, he went on to become literary editor of both The Observer and the Independent on Sunday before becoming a full-time writer in 1995. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and former Chair of the Poetry Book Society and Vice-Chair of PEN, Blake has written fiction, poetry, journalism, literary criticism and libretti, as well as adapting plays for the stage. His best-known works are probably his two memoirs, And When Did You Last See Your Father? and Things My Mother Never Told Me. Since 2003, Blake has been Professor of Creative and Life Writing at Goldsmiths College. He lives in south London.

Erica Wagner was the literary editor of the Times (UK) for seventeen years and is now a contributing writer for the New Statesman and consulting literary editor for Harper’s Bazaar. Her work has appeared in the Guardian, the Economist, the Financial Times, and the New York Times, among others. She is the author of Ariel’s Gift, Seizure, and the short story collection Gravity; she is the editor ofFirst Light: A Celebration of Alan Garner. Chief Engineer: Washington Roebling, the Man Who Built the Brooklyn Bridge, was published this year by Bloomsbury. She was the recipient of the Eccles British Library Writer’s Award in 2014, and she is a lecturer in creative writing at Goldsmiths, University of London. She lives in London with her husband and son.

Hannah Lowe’s first poetry collection Chick (Bloodaxe, 2013) won the Michael Murphy Memorial Award for Best First Collection and was short-listed for the Forward, Aldeburgh and Seamus Heaney Best First Collection Prizes. In September 2014, she was named as one of 20 Next Generation poets. She has also published three chapbooks: The Hitcher (Rialto 2012) R x (sine wave peak 2013) and Ormonde (Hercules Editions 2014). Her family memoir Long Time, No See was published by Periscope was featured as Radio 4’s Book of the Week. Her second collection, Chan, was published in 2016 by Bloodaxe.

Kwaku Osei-Afrifa was born in London and studied English with Creative Writing at Royal Holloway University. He is a Junior Editor at Unbound working under the liberatingly broad remit of commissioning across all genres of fiction and non-fiction across the two Imprints. Before this, he joined the industry assisting directors at first independent publishers, Canongate then publisher and retailer Titan Entertainment Group. He used to run a fortnightly comedy night in Piccadilly Circus, trawling conspiracy theories about dead and replaced cultural icons and writing.

Cathy Rentzenbrink is the author of The Last Act of Love and A Manual for Heartache. Cathy regularly chairs literary events, judges prizes, reviews books and speaks and writes about literacy, literature and everything in between. She has previously worked at Waterstones, Quick Reads and The Bookseller and has seen the book industry from multiple angles. Happiest when talking to strangers about books, Cathy thinks that most lives would be enriched by more reading and writing.

Miranda Doyle‘s family come from the tiny island of Coney in Sligo Bay. She grew up in Edinburgh alongside three brothers and a suspicious number of ill-fated pets. With an MA from Goldsmiths in Creative and Life Writing she teaches Memoir and Life Writing at the Faber Academy, has lectured on Autobiography for the Philosophy and European Literature degree at Anglia Ruskin University and continues to teach creative writing. Her debut book, a memoir titled A Book of Untruths, written with the support of an award from Arts Council England, explores the lies we tell ourselves.

About ten years ago, after attending a screenwriting course at Birkbeck, I wrote the first draft of a fictional, feature-length screenplay, based on events that took place in my late-teens in the early 1970s. The screenplay lay gathering dust on a shelf until a couple of years ago, when I dusted it off and wrote the second draft as a true story. As I attempted to develop it further, I realized that there were too many events and characters to fit into a 90-minute screenplay, so I decided to turn it into a book. “New Boy” is the prologue.

Read New Boy by Danny Brunton.

In 2017, Laura Morgan won a Scottish Book Trust New Writer Award for her short stories, which have been shortlisted in many competitions, including the Brighton Prize and The Moth Short Story Prize. Her work is published in various magazines and anthologies, both in the UK and abroad; a translation of her story ‘The Bridge’ appears in Taking Flight (Vietnam), a collection of international short stories with Margaret Atwood. As well as fiction, she writes reviews and essays, and has featured as a Scottish Review of Books’ Emerging Critic. She blogs creative non-fiction at aremoteview.wordpress.com

Read Small Talk by Laura Morgan

Photo credit of Laura Morgan Ⓒ Rob McDougall 

Xanthi Barker works as a learning mentor in a primary school and is studying child psychotherapy. Her previous jobs include waitress, tutor and hypnotist’s assistant. Her fiction has been published in Mslexia, Litro and Open Pen. She grew up in North London and still lives there.

Read Paradoxical by Xanthi Barker

Kate Ivanova is a Crimea-born multifaceted artist. She is currently completing her BA in English Literature at Kingston University London. Her writing consists of elements of autobiographical fiction and surrealism. In her academic and creative work, she explores issues surrounding memory, trauma, space and identity. Kate works and collaborates with artists and academics in Luxembourg, Cyprus and the United Kingdom. She is the launcher of an ongoing documentary project called ‘The Creatress Project’ which focuses on female artists and their stories. Kate is about to embark on a writing and photographic journey through India, with the aim of documenting and photographing local, female artists and their working space.

Read Being by Kate Ivanova.

David Murphy is a writer of fiction, plays, screenplays and poetry. He won the Dun Laoghaire 1500 trophy for poetry and the Heritage Arts Company Radio Play competition. His plays have been performed at the Exeter Festival and the London Festival of Visual Theatre. He was a co-editor of Tall Tales and Modern Fables magazine, and Studies in Social and Political Thought. He writes about alienation and redemption, the meeting of different cultures, classes and world views, family, and, often, about ice cream.

Read Screech Owl by David Murphy

Ruth grew up Welsh-speaking and with rural feralness. In 2016 her life took a tumble and she writes to make sense of it and the resonance she feels with planetary crisis. Currently researching for a PhD and writing a book, she seeks to be unruly; to disturb mainstream mindsets; to liberate her inner outlaw. She delights in many things: the big blowy breaths of her horses; the shapes cranes make on an urban skyline; talking ideas with friends and colleagues. Her current favourite word: precarity. More at thepracticeofthewild.com

At age fourteen I fell in love with the classical guitar, an almost obsessive love which led me to follow my tutor, his family and a troupe of Amazon Woolly monkeys to Cornwall, where we lived as a human community alongside our primate cousins. At forty I left and went to university where I received a first class degree, an MA and had an essay published entitled ‘Movies in Disguise’. As I went on to develop a new career as a university lecturer, the events of my earlier life, at the Monkey Sanctuary, became buried at the back of my mind and stayed there for many years. Gradually they have resurfaced as a story I just had to tell.

Read Another Life by Sue Rickard

Born just after the independence of India and the partition of his motherland – the then East Bengal – Arun Debnath writes about the pain of freedom based on his own life- experience. Qualified as a finance professional but he has devoted his ‘life’ to writing. Having learnt the basics of Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, Arun has sharpened his writing skills by writing his first draft novel, ‘Calcutta Calling’. He has written two short articles for the Times and the Guardian. Arun lives in Harrow with his wife and a grown-up girl and a boy.

Read Calcutta Calling by Arun Debnath

Farhana Shaikh is a writer and publisher born in Leicester. She edits The Asian Writer and runs the small press, Dahlia Publishing. Farhana hosts Writers Meet Up Leicester as well as the annual Leicester Writes Festival of New Writing. In 2017, she won Travelex & Penguin’s The Next Great Travel Writer competition and is currently part of Curve’s Cultural Leadership programme. 

Read Finding My Way Home by Farhana Shaikh

I was born in England. My parents moved to Brazil, where I lived from the ages of three to 13. Later I worked for three years teaching English at universities in Brazil. I love the sound of Brazilian Portuguese, which I speak fluently. Jorge Amado, “grand of man of Brazilian literature”, died in 2001. I love his novels, which I read in his own language, of course. I‘ve had a chequered career. I strive to write, and am lucky enough to have a wonderfully supportive and gifted writing buddy. We send each other our work and give each other the best, most honest, most constructive criticism that we can.

Read Lanugo by Penelope Maclachlan

Lui Sit was born in Hong Kong, raised in Australia and now lives in London. She started writing plays and poetry as a child; a career that peaked at age eight when a newspaper published a poem and sent her five dollars.  She has a degree in English Literature and Drama and another in Politics, Philosophy & Sociology from Murdoch University.  The writing bug followed her to London where she completed the Certificate in Creative Writing at Birbeck University and an MA from Roehampton University. Currently she is finishing her first children’s novel and getting ready to start her second.

Read Mince on Toast by Lui Sit

Stevie Heaven is a writer from Newcastle. She is a postgraduate student on the MLitt in Creative Writing at the University of Glasgow and in her other life, she works as a journalist. Once upon a time she co-ran the Desperate for Love poetry night series in Brighton, which featured readings from poets such as Sean Bonney, Jeff Hilson, Geraldine Monk and Tom Raworth. She tweets @StevieHeaven.

Read Oh, Mother by Stevie Heaven