Enter The Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize

Terra Nostra Tropical plants cr Judy DarleyWasafari magazine invites submissions of Poetry, Fiction and Life Writing for The Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize.

The prize closes on 30th June 2023 at 5pm BST.

The prize supports writers who have not yet published a book-length work, with no limits on age, gender, nationality, or background. Winners of each category receive a £1,000 cash prize and will be published in Wasafiri’s print magazine. Shortlisted writers will have their work published on the Wasafiri website. All 15 shortlistees and winners will be offered the Chapter and Verse or Free Reads mentoring scheme in partnership with The Literary Consultancy (dependent on eligibility), and a conversation with Nikesh Shukla of The Good Literary Agency to discuss their career progression

The fee is £10 for a single entry and £16 for a double entry. No entry may be more than 3,000 words long.  

Subsidised entry is available for those who would otherwise be unable to enter the prize.  

Shortlisted entrants will be notified in early September

Find full details of how to enter at www.wasafiri.org.

About the judges

Leila Aboulela (fiction judge) is the first ever winner of the Caine Prize for African Writing. Nominated three times for the Orange Prize (now the Women’s Prize for Fiction), her novels include Bird Summons, The Kindness of Enemies, The Translator, a New York Times 100 Notable Books of the Year,Minaret and Lyrics Alley, which was Fiction Winner of the Scottish Book Awards. Her short story collection Elsewhere, Home won the Saltire Fiction Book of the Year. Leila’s work has been translated into fifteen languages. Her sixth novel, River Spirit, set in Sudan in the lead up to the British invasion of 1898, is due for publication in March 2023. Leila grew up in Khartoum, Sudan and now lives in Aberdeen, Scotland. 

Diana Evans (Chair) is the author of the novels A House for Alice, Ordinary People, The Wonder and 26a, which was the inaugural winner of the Orange Award for New Writers. Ordinary People won the 2019 South Bank Sky Arts Award for Literature and was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, the Rathbones Folio Prize and the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction. She also publishes stories, essays and criticism, is associate lecturer in Creative Writing at Goldsmiths, University of London, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. 

Raised on the North Peckham estate in South London, Caleb Femi (poetry judge) is a poet and director. His debut collection, Poor, was published in 2020 by Penguin Press. He has written and directed short films for the BBC, Channel 4, Bottega Veneta and Louis Vuitton. A former Young People’s Laureate, Caleb won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection (2021) and has been shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize (2021), and longlisted for the Jhalak Prize (2021). He has been featured in the Dazed 100 list of the next generation shaping youth culture. 

Aanchal Malhotra (life writing judge) is a writer and oral historian from New Delhi. She is the co-founder of the Museum of Material Memory, and the author of two critically acclaimed books, Remnants of Partition and In the Language of Remembering, that explore the human history and generational impact of the 1947 Partition. Her work has won the Council for Museum Anthropology Book Award, and been shortlisted for the British Academy Book Prize, the Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar, Hindu Lit for Life Non Fiction Prize, Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay NIF Book Prize and the Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize. Her newest work is a debut novel titled The Book of Everlasting Things. 

Got an event, challenge, competition or call for submissions you’d like to draw my attention to? Send me an email at judydarley (at) iCloud (dot) com.

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The Commonwealth Foundation seeks tales of healthy communities

Crowd on Welsh Back Bristol. Photo by Judy Darley

adda, the online magazine of the Commonwealth Foundation. is inviting writers to submit creative works of non-fiction, short fiction, short graphic fiction and poetry on the theme of healthy communities.

They ask: “What does health mean to us as individuals and as societies? How does the climate crisis impact our health? What is the relationship between health access for all and justice? How do we imagine a world with health and care at its centre? What if we never got ill? Or if we were all doctors?”

This is a fantastic writing prompt. What issues can you highlight or invent through your words?

They are interested in works that speak creatively to questions around the idea of healthy communities, which might include creative reflections on physical and mental well-being, disability justice, sexual and reproductive rights, LGBTQIA+ healthcare, the art and practice of indigenous medicine, among others.

The deadline for submissions is 4th October 2022 at 23:59 in your time zone. 

To have your work considered, you must be a Commonwealth citizen aged 18 or over.  

Submission guidelines 

Entries should follow the following guidelines:

. Creative non-fiction: 2000-5000 words 

. Short fiction: 2000-5000 words

. Short graphic fiction: finished work of 15-20 pages or potential panels of illustrations (and a rationale) which can be fully developed within a month 

. Poetry: up to 2 poems (50 lines in total).  

Entries must be original and submitted in English, although other languages can form part of the work for context.

Only one submission per writer will be considered. If you plan to submit a fiction piece to the 2023 Commonwealth Short Story Prize, you can send the same work, provided you inform them in the form.  

Previously published work, whether in print or online, in whole or in part, will not be considered. 

Up to 30 pieces will be selected by a team of readers and editors and will be published on  adda  between February and May 2023. Writers whose work is accepted for publications will be paid a  fee.

Find full details of how to submit your work here. 

Got an event, challenge, competition or call for submissions you’d like to draw attention to? Send an email to judydarley(at)iCloud(dot)com.

Book review – Deep Water by Lu Hersey

I originally wrote and published my review of Deep Water by Lu Hersey in September 2015. I really loved this book and have been awaiting the sequel avidly! The book has just been released in a fresh edition by Tangent Books, so I decided to re-publish the review in support of Lu’s beautiful writing.

Deep Water by Lu HerseyLu Hersey’s debut may have been written with a teen readership in mind, but it transcends the YA category with a tender, eerie tale of marine myths and magic. Lu won the 2013 Mslexia Children’s Novel Writing Award for Deep Water, and the gentle, almost stealthy start belies the thrill and beauty of this book.

Danni is your average 15-year-old with an average family life, or so she thinks until the day she comes home to find her mother missing and a mysterious pool of salt water on the kitchen floor.

Along with cheery sidekick Levi, Danni is packed off to stay with her dad in Cornwall and soon becomes immersed in a world where curses take the form of ‘poppets’, the weather can be charmed with knotted fabric and a select few can take the form of seals when the fancy takes them.

In Cornwall, Danni gets to meet a family member she thought was long deceased, and discovers an inherited trait that will change her life forever – she’s a sea person, and needs to transform into a seal on a regular basis to retain her health and sanity.

Drawing on Cornish Celtic legends, Lu has created a version of the metamorphous stories that’s far removed from the fey prettiness of most mermaid tales – changing is physically excruciating for Danni and a mackerel she consumes while in seal form is painfully thrown up when returned to human physiology. Details like this keep the fantasy elements firmly rooted in reality, and make you invest wholeheartedly in the flawed yet potent core characters.

The underwater scenes are powerfully written – atmospheric and charged with dazzling energy. “Out in the open water, we circle a swarm of ghostly jellyfish with cauliflower-like tentacles that have somehow survived the winter, drifting along on some invisible current. I swim through the darkening water, somersaulting round and round in sheer joy at the sensation and the freedom.”

Continue reading

Enter a Bedtime Story Competition

Ted. By Judy Darley

The lovely folks at Lighthouse, Poole’s Centre for the Arts, are inviting entries of bedtime stories for their competition, inspired by their current series of online Bedtime Stories performed by Dorset artist Michele O’Brien.

They say, “Not only do we think bedtime stories can be the best part of the day for lots of children but also for parents. As part of our ‘It’s All About You!’ #Lockdown themed creative engagement programme we are giving you the opportunity to be creative and write your very own Bedtime Story with the winning story performed by one of our associate artists from Black Cherry Theatre Company.”

There are no age restrictions and you may want to team up with your household and do this as a family project. Stories must be typed and no more than 2500 words

All you have to do is read and comply with the Conditions of Entry, give your story a title and submit it with your name, contact number, email address and social media handles to learning@lighthousepoole.co.uk by midnight on Tuesday 21st July 2020.  

Find full details here.

Entries can be on any subject relevant to a bedtime story and in any style or form and you can enter more than once if you wish.

Worldwide copyright of each entry remains with the author, but Lighthouse Poole has unrestricted rights to publish the winning stories and any extracts from the opening chapters along with any other relevant promotional material.  Lighthouse Poole will commission a Lighthouse Associate Artist to perform at least one of the winning stories which will be uploaded to its social media platforms and website.

Winners will be notified by email on or before 31 July 2020.

Good luck!

Got an event, challenge, competition or call for submissions you’d like to draw attention to? Send an email to judydarley (at) iCloud(dot)com.

How to use myths in your writing

Sphinx, Egypt, by Justin NewlandIn today’s guest post, author Justin Newland talks us through the ancient stories that helped to inspire his novel Sources of the Genes of Isis.

I guess I’ve always had an inquiring mind. I wanted to explore our origins. Where did we come from? How did we get where we are today? I wanted to conceive a story that offered the discerning reader a different entry point to these age-old questions.

I began by looking through the glass darkly into the past. I quickly ended up in Ancient Greece, and eventually in Ancient Egypt, the earliest recorded historical culture.

The Ancient Egyptians also imagined their origins though creation myths, of which one is the myth of Osiris. He was king to Isis’ queen. But Set murders Osiris, dismembers him and distributes his body parts all over Egypt. Isis gathers them together, miraculously brings him back to life, and bears him a son, the hawk-headed Horus.

This is a story of life and death, procreation, rebirth and the struggle for power, all of them archetypal themes. And the basic ingredients of the myth are not a bad template for a novel: start, weave the threads, spread them far and wide, then collect them altogether, breathe new life into them for a pulsating climax.

That wasn’t all. Many great men have set their feet upon the path to Egypt: Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and Napoleon Bonaparte. It was the first and oldest civilisation, and therefore influenced everything that followed. The first in any field always does. In this respect, Egypt is the Mother and Father of all things.

That set me going. 

Explore infinite possibilities

Next up, I discovered legends from other ancient cultures that mentioned cross-breeding between species, of mixed genetics, and hybrids. The apocryphal The Book of Enoch spoke of the Grigori, or ‘fallen angels’, who came to Earth and mated with ‘the daughters of men,’ spawning the Nephilim, an antediluvian race of giants. The Epic of Gilgamesh talked of strange beings such as fish-men, who came ashore for the day, and returned to the sea at night. Even today, you can see a stone carving of such a creature at the Temple of Queen Hatshepsut behind the Valley of the Kings in Egypt. (see above)

These and other sources fired my imagination. What if these ‘fallen angels’ manifested in human form and settled in Ancient Egypt? What if antediluvian genetics were unstable, in that the normal bindings that prevented the existence of crossbreeds had become loosened, spawning mixed genetic creatures and humans with the head of animals?

The germ of the idea for the novel was born: an alternative genesis of the human race.

Interwoven with these threads was esoteric information about such concepts as the astral light and the akashic record, referenced by the Theosophical Society and, more recently, the Emin Society. They conceived of the akashic record as a compendium of thoughts, events, and emotions encoded in a non-physical plane of existence.

This is where I derived the name for the novel’s heroine, Akasha, a Sanskrit word meaning ‘aether’ or atmosphere.

Also mooted was the astral body, a sort of personal spirit entity, which could leave a person (usually during sleep) and travel the astral light, there to explore the akashic record and so re-live any event or person from any time in history. This is what Edgar Cayce, an American mystic, claimed to have done. His profuse and profound writings speak of the time before the Flood.

All this nourished my fascination for the supernatural.

Doris Lessing’s Shikasta contained some original and interesting ideas about how humans may have lived in the times before recorded history.

I got the name Samlios, where the Akasha is born and where the initial action of the novel unfolds, from Gurdjieff’s Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson.

Then the Flood. Where did that fit into the story? Now, think about it for a moment. If it rained for 40 days and 40 nights, how did all that water get up there in the first place?

What about this utterance from the Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts‘I shall cross the great lake in the sky and return home to my double on the sun.’

More recently, Old Mother Shipton, a Yorkshire prophetess, coined her answer: ‘Beneath the water, men shall walk. Shall ride, shall sleep, shall even talk.’

What if the waters were already up there in the sky, and the earth had shrunk like a dried prune, leaving the remaining oceans on narrow and shallow sea beds?

Another element of the world of The Genes of Isis was taking shape.

Egypt by Justin Newland

Build a narrative and characters

With two main sources, I needed two protagonists, one to speak for the humans, and the other for the angels, whom I called the Solarii. I envisaged the embryonic human race as blue-blooded, gentle folk, and kind. The Solarii on the other hand, were drawn as severe, powerful and dedicated.

A comparison of opposites yielded a girl and boy, young and old, Akasha and Horque. The main characters took shape.

The Genes of Isis cover by Justin NewlandThen in the novel, I twisted another Biblical weave: instead of having the Jews as slaves to the Egyptians, I conceived of them as willing helpers and servants.

When I started work on the novel, I began with the idea, a rough storyline, giving me the destination. Then the characters emerged out of the plot and suggested parts they could play. Sometimes I heard their voices when composing the dialogue. Sometimes my imagination revealed things about them, like what they carried in their pockets.

I found my characters crouching behind the plot lines, emerging out of the shadows of the narrative, and in the great halls of the unconscious (yes, even in dreams).

Looking so far back into pre-history, there was an abiding sense of peering into a dark timeless abyss, and where sometimes, as Nietzsche predicted, the abyss stared back. That was unnerving. Especially as most of what I was researching had no fixed points, no salient facts on which anyone agreed.

Then again, it did leave plenty of room for the imagination.

All this and more is in The Genes of Isis.

Justin NewlandAuthor bio

Justin Newland lives with his partner in plain sight of the Mendip Hills, in Somerset, England. His short stories published in anthologies: The Fool of Abbot’s Leigh in Hidden Bristol and Fisher of Men in North by Southwest. Vallum Hadriani is published in The Dark Half of the Year, a collection of ghost stories by the North Bristol Writers.

Justin’s debut novel, The Genes of Isis, is published by Silverwood Books. It’s set in Ancient Egypt, and draws on two main sources: the myth of Osiris and the story of the flood in the Book of Genesis. Find out more at www.thegenesofisis.com.

All images in this post were supplied by the author.

Submit your writing to Zoetic Press

Arnos Vale sunken grave cr Judy DarleyGot a few moments to spare between Christmas and New Year? Zoetic Press invite submissions of fiction and non-fiction eulogising the fallen icons who have touched your lives. The chosen works will be published in an anthology titled Dear Beloved.

The deadline for submissions is 13th January 2017.

They say: “2016 has been a year of the significant loss of cultural icons, from music and recording artists to literary titans and sports heroes. Social media has made grief and loss a shared experience for the people influenced by these celebrities. And while the internet guarantees that there will never be agreement in the legacy left behind, it has also created a new norm in how we grieve, publicly and privately. Artists, musicians, writers, directors, sports heroes, politicians, and actors reveal us to ourselves through their work.”

Written a piece to help you mourn Prince, David Bowie or Victoria Wood? This could be your chance to publically mark their impact on your life. While Zoetic Press are particularly interested pieces which memorialise public figures who’ve died this year, all in memoriams submitted will be given equal attention. “However, please make sure the icon you’re writing about is actually dead – we suggest double-checking the Dead or Alive Info website just to be certain.”

They add: “We regret that we cannot consider In Memoriam pieces for Dearly Beloved which are not about public figures. We cannot consider pieces about family members, pets, friends, or figures that are not public for Dearly Beloved – this anthology is a memorial for the artists and public personalities that shape each of us differently.”

For this anthology, Zoetic Press seek fiction and creative non-fiction of up to 5,000 words in length, and flash fiction up to 1,000 words in length.

Find full guidelines here zoetic-press.myshopify.com/pages/submissions

Create a setting for your story

Buddhist monks and offerings cr Dipika Mukherjee

Author Dipika Mukherjee tells us how she came to set an award-winning novel in Shambala Junction, India, and advises how we can make setting play a role in our own writing.

One of the nicest perks about being a writer is that it is a great excuse to travel, all in the guise of research. Although Shambala Junction is an imaginary place, writing the novel took me on lovely long train journeys through India.

Mine your own memories

Shambala Junction begins with a rather jinxed train journey for the protagonist, Iris, an Indian-American young woman visiting India with her new fiancée. I mined the memories of my own childhood, especially the wonderful nostalgia of long train journeys from New Delhi Station to Howrah in Kolkata, to write Iris’s wide-eyed enchantment with the ubiquitous details of Indian life.

Every summer, when the heat drove Delhiites to cooler cities, my family would board the Rajhdhani Express for a 24-hour journey with a long halt at Mughal Serai. Mughal Serai in my childhood had makeshift stalls selling colourful wooden dolls; although, it is almost impossible to find these artisans at railway stations anymore, Aman’s stall is inspired by my vivid memories:

He had an array of colorful wooden dolls spread out in front of him on a pushcart: there were dolls with turbans and flared coats playing flutes and dholaks; there were men riding horses with colorful stirrups and dazzling sword-sheaths; there were dancers dancing with the left leg slightly on tiptoe, caught in mid-swirl in the disarray of flouncing skirts.

Iris was enchanted. She had once owned a dancing doll just like that one, a beloved painted wooden thing with a crack in the veiled head, a gift from some unremembered relative in her childhood.

New Delhi cr Dipika Mukherjee

Start with a vein of truth

I started writing this novel after being enraged at the tone of an article about ‘baby shopping’ which was about international adoptions fuelling child-trafficking in India. This is a global problem, not just limited to India, and the trafficking moves from one impoverished country to another as the authorities start clamping down on severe irregularities I wanted the western world to realise that we are all complicit in this, especially by pretending that if poor children are placed in affluent homes it makes the world a better place.

I wrote the first draft in about three months in Amsterdam, then I edited this novel over four years, toning down the rage and making the characters blossom into real people. A novel like this taught me that there are far too many victims in these stories to be a novel about the East vs West or the Consumerist North vs Impoverished South. This story needed nuanced characters, and I was very aware of how easy it was for me, as an author, to have them climb onto soapboxes.

Use your imagination 

So this story shifted, from being based in New Delhi, to an imaginary Shambala Junction, loosely based on Gaya. Gaya is an ancient city and a deeply spiritual place where the Buddha attained enlightenment. It has a real hill where the Buddha preached the Fire Sermon and a Mahabodhi temple, and these feature in the novel as well. At the same time, Gaya is also within the state of Bihar, which was at that time considered one of the most badly governed, lawless and corrupt states in India. I travelled to Gaya alone to get a sense of the place and visited the Mahabodhi temple, with its most international gathering of Buddhist pilgrims from all around the world alongside general tourists like me.

Buddha cr Dipika Mukherjee

I also visited the cave with an emaciated Buddha figure; an image rarely portrayed in Buddhist iconography, yet the rigors of attaining Nirvana would certainly have necessitated this condition. It was a startling image; a reminder of the frailty and mortality of all human condition.

The hill where Buddha preached the Fire Sermon was quite a trek, and in the novel, I transmute my experience into the voice of Emily, a Canadian woman wanting to adopt an Indian girl-child:

Emily raised her head. She could see the motley group of children heading for the next tourist bus pulling in. They had no time for play; it was work for them as long as tourists like her showed up. She felt her eyes prickle; so many children with miserable lives. Too many children who could not be adopted into better lives.

Beside a square white enclosure it was all brown on the hill. The rough-hewn rocks scattered on the dusty ground made room for brown shoots to limply wave in the wind. Her skin tingled with a tragic epiphany; on this hill, pregnant with religious history, she could see absolutely no signs of life.

Unlike Emily, I was left with a very happy memory by my trip to Gaya. During my visit to the Mahabodhi temple, as I sat under the Bodhi tree meditating with other people at the site where the Buddha had attained Nirvana, a stray leaf twirled down from the green canopy of the Bodhi Pallanka overhead and fell into my lap. That dried leaf is now framed and hangs in my home in Chicago; I like to think that the Buddha approved this story much before it found a publisher or won a prize!

Author Dipika MukherjeeAbout the author

Dipika Mukherjee’s debut novel was long-listed for the Man Asian Literary Prize, then published as Thunder Demons (Gyaana, 2011, South Asia) and Ode to Broken Things (Repeater, 2016, World). Shambala Junction is her second novel and won the 2016 Virginia Prize for Fiction (Aurora Metro, 2016). She won the Gayatri GaMarsh Award for Literary Excellence (USA, 2015) and the Platform Flash Fiction Prize (India, 2009). Her short story collections include Rules of Desire (Fixi, Malaysia, 2015) and edited collections Champion Fellas (Word Works, 2016), Silverfish New Writing 6 (Silverfish, 2006) and The Merlion and Hibiscus (Penguin, 2002).

Read my review of Shambala Junction tomorrow.

Listening to Bees – a short story

The Simple Things March 2015My tale ‘Listening to Bees’ is the bedtime story in the beautiful March issue of The Simple Things magazine. Isn’t that a gorgeous cover? It makes me think of things budding and bursting into bloom, filling the air with fragrance.

I’m really happy to have   ‘Listening to Bees’ published in the mag, not least because the talented Hannah Warren has illustrated the tale.

The story is about a woman trying to reunite an elderly brother his rather eccentric sister, with a scene in Bristol’s Botanic Garden.

In other writing news, my flash fiction Gloss has been published by Visual Verse. You can read it here: http://visualverse.org/submissions/gloss-2/

And on March 19th I’ll be reading one of my short stories at Bristol literary regular, Novel Nights, taking place at The Lansdown. Hope to see you there!