ESSAY PRIZE:
Dani Garavelli has been announced as the first ever winner of the new Anne Brown Essay Prize. Created in memory of the late Anne Brown, a respected BBC radio producer and former chair of the Wigtown Book Festival, the award will be given each year at the festival for the best literary essay, published or unpublished, by a writer in or from Scotland.
Shortlisted among eight authors, Garavelli took the prize for The Bequest. The judges praised it as: “An account of family, belonging and what ties us together as humans that is emotionally astute, brilliantly observed and moves flawlessly between the particular and the general.”
Dani Garavelli is an award-winning freelance journalist and documentary maker who writes for several newspapers, including The Herald. She was presented with her £1,500 prize and a trophy at the Wigtown Book Festival on Sunday (September 26) by Anne Brown’s daughter, Jo Lawrence.
Adrian Turpin, artistic director of Wigtown Book Festival, said the shortlist had been "outstanding" with topics including parental loss, racial violence, climate change, family secrets and Covid. He described The Bequest as “an extremely personal piece of writing about family relationships” that in Garavelli’s hands, “becomes universal”.
The Wigtown Book Festival continues until October 4 www.wigtownbookfestival.com
TIME-TRAVEL:
Writers aged 11-19 are being urged to connect with their inner time-traveller and enter the Young Walter Scott Prize 2021. They're asked to write an 800-2000-word piece of short fiction set in a time before they were born. Entries can be prose, poetry, drama, fictional letters or reportage. There are two age categories – 11 to 15 years and 16 to 19 years – with the winner of each receiving a £500 travel grant and tickets to the Baillie Gifford Borders Book Festival, Melrose in June 2022, where they’ll be presented with their prizes. All winning and highly commended writers will see their work published in the special Young Walter Scott Prize anthology.
Last year’s winner in the 16-19 age group was Madeleine Friedlein for Slaying Holofernes, a piece inspired by a painting she'd seen on a TV exhibition during the first lockdown in spring, 2020. The 11-15 age category winner was Atlas Weyland Eden, whose We Wolves is set 35,000 years ago in the steppe of Central Europe.
Looking ahead to this year’s competition, the judges say they are intrigued to find out whether the unprecedented experience of living through a pandemic will manifest itself directly in young people’s writing, or whether escapism will come to the fore.
Dame Hilary Mantel, winner of the iconic 2021 Walter Scott Prize for The Mirror and the Light, offers this advice to those starting out in writing historical fiction: “Remember facts are never the whole story. Research is not just about names and dates –it’s about imaginative, sensory closeness to the past ... For your chosen period, you become a magpie. As you are reading, watching, listening, you pick up anything that glitters. Don’t ask, how does this fit in my story? Just take it home to your nest. Sooner or later, you’ll see why it attracted you.”
Entries can be submitted until the closing date of November 1, 2021. Full details at www.ywsp.co.uk
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