Inkerman Writers
a showcase of our work
Northern Writers’ Awards
New Writing North has announced that the Northern Writers’ Awards are now open for submissions.
The Awards were established in 2000 as a pioneering programme that aimed to support both new and established writers in the pursuit of their creative ambitions. Since then, they have supported more than 150 writers, many of whom have gone on to achieve publication of their work in the UK and internationally.
Originally open only to writers in the North East, the awards, thanks to the support of Northumbria University, are now open to writers in the North East, North West and Yorkshire.
The awards support writers of prose, poetry, creative non-fiction and children’s fiction. From this year there will also be a new programme of awards for young writers: the Cuckoo Young Writers Award and the Matthew Hale Award.
For new writers, winning a Northern Writers’ Award helps to get them noticed by agents and publishers and lifts them onto the first rung of the ladder towards publication. For more established writers, awards can buy precious time to undertake a new project or to support work in progress that has not yet been commissioned. The support that winning writers receive includes cash awards alongside mentoring, editorial feedback and support and help with professional development within the writing industry.
Past winners of the Northern Writers’ Awards include novelist and poet Carolyn Jess-Cooke, who won both a Northern Promise Award in 2008 and a Poetry Award in 2013; Niel Bushnell, who met his agent through the awards and has gone on to publish the popular children’s Timesmith series, and writer Ben Myers, whose Pig Iron has been critically acclaimed and won the 2013 inaugural Gordon Burn Prize.
For more information and to enter, go to www.northernwritersawards.com
The deadline for submission is 5pm on Friday 17 January 2014. The awards will be announced on Tuesday 17 June 2014. Entry is by online submission only.
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Comment
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Comment by John Dean on November 13, 2013 at 4:22pm
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Good luck, Tom!
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Comment by Tom Benson on November 13, 2013 at 2:26pm
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Thank you for the heads-up John. The first (rough) draft of my third novel has been left aside for a few months, so it looks like I've got another reason to work hard on it. I'll start work on it again this weekend. I might concentrate on perfecting the first three chapters and synopsis to meet the deadline.
About
DfC
The Inkerman Writers are members of Darlington for Culture (DfC), which was set up in 2010 to help save Darlington Arts Centre from closure.
Its members include representatives of arts and community groups.
DfC was established after the centre’s owner, Darlington Borough Council, announced that budget cuts meant that it would have to withdraw its subsidy from the Arts Centre.
Although the centre closed, the organisation remains active - more at www.darlingtonforculture.org
Publications
Welcome to the site created by the Inkerman Writers to showcase our work.
Based in Darlington, North East England, and having celebrated their tenth anniversary in 2013, members have enjoyed success in a variety of arenas, including winning, and being shortlisted and highly commended, in short story competitions, having novels published and publishing the short story anthology A Strawberry in Winter, which can be obtained by visiting the website www.blurb.com
The group's second anthology of short stories, Christophe's Farewell and Other Stories, can be obtained, cost £4.95 plus postage and packing, from
The Inkerman Writers’ latest book, Out of the Shadows, which was launched as part of the 2013 Darlington Arts Festival, is on sale. The book can be ordered direct from
http://www.blurb.co.uk/b/4204019-out-of-the-shadows
The group also produced The Last Waltz, a double CD of short stories, available by contacting deangriss@btinternet.com, cost £5 plus p and p.
Several of our writers wrote original one-act plays in a collaboration with the Green Theatre company, which were performed at Darlington Arts Centre early in February, 2012.
Darlington-based Inkerman Writers have produced their latest anthology of short stories, Inkerman Street, based on the demolition of a fictional northern street and the stories of the people who lived in it.
The book, which features a variety of stories ranging from horror to comedy, was launched to a large audience at the Darlington Arts Festival Literary Day on Saturday May 26 and begins like this:
“Inkerman Street is still and graveyard-hushed tonight, the terraced houses cold behind boarded-up windows, silent sentinels among a sea of wasteland. No one lives here now and tomorrow the bulldozers will move in to flatten the houses to make way for the Council’s Grand Plan.
“Although the people are long gone, the houses still have life. Peek into one of the bedrooms and see on the wall a painting of a seaside scene, brightly-coloured boats bobbing in the harbour, fishermen pipe-smoking in the noonday sun and seagulls wheeling high above the choppy waters. In the roaring silence of the night, you can hear the screeching of the birds and taste the salt air, acrid and herring-sharp at the back of your throat. It is an illusion; the bedroom is empty and the blooms on the faded wallpaper have long since wilted.
“The air in the houses is musty with neglect yet but a few months before, these were bustling homes filled with frying bacon and steaming irons, whistling kettles and playing children. The houses witnessed all these scenes for more than 150 years. Behind their curtains were enacted a thousand stories but tomorrow they will be destroyed because Inkerman Street is the last of its ilk.
“Now, on the eve of the street’s death, the people who once lived here have returned, gathering solemn and silent in the mist, the ghosts of the past come to pay final tribute….”
The anthology can be purchased at http://www.blurb.co.uk/bookstore/invited/7524452/bae89c993c98ec8c8b37b12d6b9b37ecced5dec3
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