londondwritingworkshops.com

Posts Tagged ‘debut novel’

I was so pleased when I spotted Cristin Terrill’s debut novel All Our Yesterdays  (Bloomsbury, 2013) on the shelves in Waterstones’ YA section, in Greenwich the other day. Here’s a pic I took on my phone. Cristin took part in the first Novelists’ Club six-month course back in 2009. I remember her incredible dedication to writing 750 words a day, EVERY day. It’s clearly paid off. Congratulations, Cristin!

To read reviews of the book on Goodreads click here. Her Amazon page is here.

.
Tweet

Congratulations to Annemarie Neary, who attended the first Novelists’ Club in 2009. Having gathered a slew of honours for her short stories in recent years, including winning the 2011 Columbia Journal fiction prize, she is about to publish her first novel: A Parachute in the Lime Tree.

Synopsis: Easter Tuesday 1941, and German bombers are in the air, about to attack Belfast.  Oskar is an unwilling conscript whose Jewish sweetheart Elsa was forced to flee Berlin for Ireland two years before. Alienated from the Nazi state and from his own family, he has taken the fateful decision to bail out over neutral Ireland in search of her.

The unpredictable Kitty awakes in remote Dunkerin and finds a parachute caught in one of the trees on her land. When she discovers Oskar, injured and foraging for food in her kitchen, he becomes a rare and exciting secret. But Ireland during the Emergency is an uneasy place, and news of the parachute soon spreads…. 

Copies will be available from March 1st. To buy a copy of A Parachute in the Lime Tree directly from the publishers, click here: The History Press 

More information about Annemarie on her website: Annemarie Neary.

Tweet

The annual Worlds Literature Festival takes place in Norwich from 20th-24th June this year, with a variety of public events and speakers including Joseph O’Connor, John Boyne, A.S. Byatt, Hisham Matar and many more.

Tuesday’s Summer Read event features a personal favourite of mine. Katie Kitamura (pictured) will be reading from her flawless debut novel about a prizefighter The Longshot (6pm, Norfolk and Norwich Millennium Library). As it says on the back of the book, ‘Hemingway’s returned to life – and this time, he’s a woman’ (Tom McCarthy).

Click here for information on the participants of Worlds Literature Festival 2011.

Next week is the closing date for  a prize for unpublished writers that is beginning to develop quite a reputation for launching careers. Roshi Fernando, whose novel Homesick won the Impress Prize For New Writers in 2009, will now be published by Bloomsbury in the UK and Commonwealth, and in the US by Knopf, an imprint of Random House. Ginny Baily’s debut novel Africa Junction, which was shortlisted for the Impress Prize in 2007, has been published in 2011 by the Random House imprint Harvill Secker.

Roshi Fernando was also shortlisted for the Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award this year.

More information about entering the prize here: Impress Prize