Oxford Brookes creative writing fellow wins national awardA creative writing fellow from Oxford Brookes University has won the BBC National Short Story Award. Kate Clanchy, a fellow on the MA in Creative Writing at the university has beaten two Orange prize winners to clinch this award. After receiving one of Britain’s foremost writing awards along with the £15,000 prize money Clanchy said, ‘I’m very grateful to the BBC. You don’t actually earn that much money out of writing, so you don’t feel justified doing it. This award has given me the permission to go away and spend time writing.’ Her entry, The Not Dead and the Saved, was only the third short piece of fiction she has ever written. Judges praised her writing for the ‘acute control of emotional tone’ and its ‘vividness and generosity’. She is already an established poet, having won the Somerset Maugham Award, Saltire and Forward Prizes. She says, ‘When I started writing poetry it was a secret pleasure. Nobody knew I was writing at all, and it has been just the same with the short story. Now I've been discovered, but all this is tremendously affirming.‘ Clanchy beat both Lionel Shriver, who won the Orange Prize in 2005 for the best-seller We Need to Talk About Kevin, and Naomi Alderman, whose debut novel Disobedience won the Orange Award for New Writers in 2006. Find out more about the MA in Creative Writing at Oxford Brookes University. Content added on 7th January 2009. |
    |