Guest Speakers Spring 2023

There are many exciting Creative Writing events happening this term in the Centre for New Writing at the University of Leicester. Here are some of them! They are all free and open to all - students, staff and the public. If you'd like more information about any of them, please email Jonathan Taylor, jt265[at]le[dot]ac[dot]uk or cnw[at]le[dot]ac[dot]uk for further details.

The State of Publishing, with Farhana Shaikh

Wednesday 8 March 2023, 4-5pm in Attenborough building, room 001

Multi-award-winning author, CEO of Dahlia Publishing and founder of The Asian Writer, Farhana Shaikh will discuss diversity in the publishing industry, and the role that small presses are playing to make the industry more inclusive.

What Came First, Character or Plot? A Masterclass, with Adele Parks

Wednesday 15 March 2023, 2-4pm in Attenborough building, room 002

Join one of the UK’s bestselling novelists for a masterclass on writing fiction. Please bring a draft piece of fiction or dramatic writing you’ve written to the class. 

N.B. This masterclass is part of the MA in Creative Writing, but is open to all. Numbers are limited, so if you'd like to attend, please email cnw[at]le[dot]ac[dot]uk.

Literary Leicester Festival 2023

Wednesday 22 March 2023 to Saturday 25 March 2023

Literary Leicester is the University of Leicester’s annual free literary festival, open to all. Brought to you by the School of Arts and the Centre for New Writing, the festival hosts events at the university and right across the city, in cinemas, theatres, community halls, schools and more.

Free and open to all! You can see the full line-up for this year's events here. 

Climate Fiction Workshop, with Liz Jensen, in collaboration with Literary Leicester 2023

Friday 24 March 2023, 130-230pm in Leicester Central Library

Join multi-award-winning novelist and member of Extinction Rebellion’s ‘Writers Rebel’ for a practical workshop on writing climate fiction or ‘cli-fi.’

N.B. Numbers are limited, so please book in advance on Literary Leicester's Eventbrite site here. 

Claiming Our Unconscious and Re-remembering Our Stolen History, with Amirah Mohiddin

Monday 27 March 2023, 10am-12 in Sir Bob Burgess building, room 002.

This masterclass will look at where our ideas come from, and using your own history and memories in writing. Amirah will be discussing her writing, inspirations and research. She will lead a workshop where you will be encouraged to use a memory, dream or folk story as impetus for a free-writing exercise.

Amirah Mohiddin is a writer, a third-year PhD student in Creative Writing and a tutor with The Brilliant Club teaching her self-designed Creative Writing course ‘Our Future Storytellers’ to students aged 13-16. Her PhD research focuses on female storytelling as a form of salvation and heroism in Arabic literature with the aim to reconstruct formidable and empowering storytellers in a YA fantasy novel. Her short stories have been published in magazines, ebooks and physical books, including Dancing Bear Books, Litro Magazine, Post-mortem Press, The New Luciad and Sanroo Publishing. Her MA novel, The Fallen Warriors, has been submitted to editors by her agent in the hope of acquirement.  

N.B. This guest talk is part of the MA in Creative Writing, but is also open to all. If you'd like to attend, please email jt265[at]le[dot]ac[dot]uk to reserve a place. 

Creative Writing Student Showcase, Literary Leicester

Monday 27 March, 530-645pm, Attenborough Arts Centre, Studio 1

As part of Literary Leicester Festival, we'll be holding a showcase event for University of Leicester BA, MA and PhD Creative Writing students to read and perform their poetry, stories and scripts. If you're a student and would like to get involved, please email Jonathan Taylor on jt265[at]le[dot]ac[dot]uk. You can book here. 

Writing Collaborations, Collaborating to Write: Creating Supportive Communities, with Barbara Cooke

Wednesday 29 March, 2-4pm in Attenborough room 002

This talk will focus on the different types of collaboration that make up the professional life of a writer, editor and academic. Barbara will be drawing on her own experiences of poetic co-creation, collaboration with an illustrator, and setting up and participating in writing retreats to show that while writing is usually a solitary act, no writer need ever be alone.

Dr Barbara Cooke is a senior lecturer in English at Loughborough University. She worked in publishing before completing a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing at the University of East Anglia. She is Co-executive Editor of the Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh and the author of Evelyn Waugh’s Oxford.

N.B. This guest talk is part of the MA in Creative Writing, but is also open to all. If you'd like to attend, please email jt265[at]le[dot]ac[dot]uk to reserve a place. 

Val McDermid, 'Killing People for Fun and Profit': Annual Creative Writing Lecture

Tuesday 9 May 2023, 615-730pm - venue TBC

One of the UK’s best-selling crime novelists talks about her work and craft, and will be signing books afterwards. 

N.B. Please book tickets via Eventbrite here. 

Masterclass, with Louis de Bernières

Wednesday 10 May 2023, 10am-12 in Attenborough building room 002

Join the multi-award winning author of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, Birds Without Wings, Notwithstanding, and many other books in a masterclass on the art of writing fiction.

N.B. This guest talk is part of the MA in Creative Writing, but is also open to all. If you'd like to attend, please email jt265[at]le[dot]ac[dot]uk to reserve a place. 

Congratulations to Dan Powell!

Dan Powell, a PhD in Creative Writing student at the University of Leicester, has won first prize in a national short story competition. He's the winner of this year’s Leicester Writes Short Story Prize. 

The winning story, "Dissolution," was chosen anonymously by the judging panel, which included writers Rebecca Burns, Mark Newman and Selma Carvalho. There were over 165 entries received from across the UK.

Dan wins a cash prize and will have his story published in the prize anthology. 

He said: “I am thrilled to receive first prize in the Leicester Writes Short Story Prize. As writers, we often work for long periods alone, unsure whether what we are working on will connect with people. To have a story recognised in this way always means a great deal, but in these days of social distancing it means so much more."

Dan’s winning story was created using a preclosural writing methodology developed as part of his doctoral research in Creative Writing at University of Leicester. The data from his preclosural analysis of fifteen British short stories written between 1885-1920 was used to construct a structural and linguistic writing frame to guide the writing of this story. 

“My research explores the benefits of using a preclosural methodology in the writing of short fiction, both for the individual author and the writing teacher. This story’s success in the Leicester writes Short Story Prize further supports my findings that this approach can help writers of all ages and skill levels improve their craft.”

You can read more about Dan's research here. 

Now in its fourth year, the short story prize is organised by city-based small press, Dahlia Publishing, and is open to published and unpublished writers, for a short story of up to 3000 words on any theme or subject. 

Judges praised the exceptional quality of entries received this year. Rebecca Burns, chair of judges said: “The standard of story-writing was yet again impressive and made the job of shortlisting and picking the eventual winners a delight, challenging, and a lot of fun. I’d like to thank all the writers who sent their stories in, for trusting us with their words. We all felt that ‘Dissolution’ was a well-deserved winner – the story is poignant, beautifully paced, had great depth and pathos, and will speak to many of us during this strange time, as we try to work out which direction our lives will go in.”

Twenty short stories featured on this year’s longlist will be published in an anthology. The collection will be launched online later in the year. 

The full results can be found online at www.leicesterwrites.co.uk.

About Dan Powell
Dan Powell is a prize-winning author of short fiction and First Story Writer-in-Residence. His debut collection of stories, Looking Out of Broken Windows, was shortlisted for the Scott Prize and longlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award and the Edge Hill Prize. He is currently working on his PhD as a Doctoral Researcher in Creative Writing at University of Leicester. His research explores preclosure and closural staging in short fiction. Dan can be found online at danpowellfiction.com and @danpowfiction.

Laura Besley, "The Almost Mothers"

Laura Besley writes short (and very short) fiction in the precious moments that her children are asleep. Her fiction has appeared online (Fictive Dream, Spelk, EllipsisZine) as well as in print (Flash: The International Short Story Magazine) and in various anthologies (Adverbally Challenged, Another Hong Kong, Story Cities). The Almost Mothers is her first collection and is published by Dahlia Publishing.

About the book
The Almost Mothers by Laura Besley is a flash fiction collection exploring the theme of motherhood.

A first-time mum struggles with her newborn baby. An alien examines the lives of Earth Mothers. A baby sleeps through the night at long last.

Written with raw honesty, Laura Besley's debut flash collection, The Almost Mothers, exposes what it really means to be a mother. 

Below, Laura talks about the experience and process of writing the book. 


Writing The Almost Mothers 
By Laura Besley

I stopped writing for about a year after having my eldest son. Not because I wanted to, but because I was exhausted: physically, mentally, emotionally, and it left no space for anything else. When I started writing again, in fits and starts, one of the first pieces I wrote was ‘The Motherhood Contract.’ Elspeth, the main character, is not me, but like me, she is struggling with becoming a mother, and making sense of her world now that she is a mother. 

As I started writing more, I noticed that I had a growing number of pieces about motherhood, with different characters, covering different facets of motherhood, and in 2018 I did FlashNano (write a piece of flash fiction for every day of November) and most of these pieces were about motherhood too. In December 2018 I put the collection together to enter into a competition. It was long-listed and this gave me the confidence to submit to Dahlia Books when Farhana Shaikh, editor and director, put out a call for submissions in April 2019.  

There’s been a surge in ‘honest’ writing about motherhood, something I felt was lacking only five or six years ago when I first became a mother. There was an expectation of motherhood and the gap between that and reality, I felt at least, was insurmountable. I’d like to think that the overall message of this collection is honesty; we’re not all going to find it easy. 

Here’s an extract from one of the stories:


From ‘The Motherhood Contract.’

You must not tell the mother-to-be that she will lose herself.

Elspeth feels cheated. No-one warned her that she would no longer recognise herself: physically, mentally, and in every other way. She looks in the mirror and wonders who that person is with pale skin and massive purple globs under her eyes; lank and greasy hair; and a body that still looks six months pregnant months after birth.

Meeting her old friends no longer holds appeal as she has nothing to talk about but the baby, and their frustrations seem so trivial. Meeting the women from her antenatal class is unappealing because all they talk about is babies. And going out without the baby isn’t an option.

Leicester Book Prize 2018

By Jonathan Taylor

Over the last few weeks, I've had the pleasure of judging the inaugural Leicester Book Prize, with co-judges Farhana Shaikh and Matthew Vaughan. Farhana Shaikh runs Leicester Writes Festival, and Dahlia Publishing, and founded the prize; Matthew Vaughan is Development Librarian in Leicester, runs Leicester Writers' Showcase, and is also himself a storyteller.  

The prize was open to any book by a Leicestershire-based writer, published between May 2017 and April 2018. Books could be commercially, independently or self-published. Since this was the first year that the prize had run, we had to decide on judging criteria, and a statement about the prize. This is what we came up with:

“As well as literary and aesthetic quality, we will reward texts which represent or embody the values which we see as characteristic of the city: diversity, individuality, multiculturalism, democracy and an ever-surprising eccentricity. For that reason, the prize will aim to treat texts which are independently published, self-published or, in some way, marginalised, on an equal footing with books from major publishers. It will aim to celebrate books which have been overlooked by the mainstream.”

It was an absolute delight reading the books submitted. The books were remarkably varied and of a standard which would compare with any city in the country, or beyond. I have felt for a while that the literary scene in Leicester - with its multiple literary festivals, its nationally-known poetry and open-mic events, Leicester Writers' Club, its publishers and university courses - is going through a bit of a golden age; and the quality of the books on both shortlist and longlist is a testament to this. 

All of the books were celebrated at a special event on June 12th at the Exchange Bar in Leicester, which included readings, talks and the presentation of the award. I don't believe literature is a competition; so, although in the end we had to choose a "winner," it's important to stress that the prize celebrates all of the wonderful books published in the area over the last year. 

I've listed the books below, with a few thoughts on each of them. 


Winner

The winner of the 2018 Leicester Book Prize was Rod Duncan, for his novel The Queen of All Crows. This was a hugely imaginative, compelling and ambitious work of speculative fiction, which frankly I loved, start to finish. I've never read anything quite like it. 

Shortlist

The other books on the shortlist were:

Animal Lovers by Rob Palk: a very funny, and elegantly written novel, which was hugely entertaining throughout. 

The Things We Thought We Knew by Mahsuda Snaith: a thoughtful and poignant novel about friendship and loss - full of poetry and humour. 


Neon Sky by Maud Wainwright-Pilton: a sophisticated and musical novel in poetry - I couldn't put it down.

Longlist

The other books on the longlist were:

Birds Without Sky by Malka Al-Haddad: a harrowing collection of poems, with beautiful illustrations, about the refugee experience - a politically important and hard-hitting book. 

Kingstone by Katherine Hetzel: a beautifully written and very original fantasy story.

Dream Dreams by Sandra Pollock: an inspiring pamphlet of poems. I particularly enjoyed the poems written in the Barbadian dialect. 

Restless Coffins by M. P. Wright: a crime novel full of adventure and political substance - vivid and compelling. 

Writers Rod Duncan, Maud Wainwright-Pilton, Rob Palk