New Writing

UEA alumna Emma Healey and American novelist Vendela Vida will be appearing at the UEA literary festival this Wednesday, when they will be interviewed on stage by Chris Bigsby and give readings from their work. Emma graduated from the UEA MA in Creative Writing (Prose Fiction) in 2011 and published her first novel Elizabeth is Missing last year. This went on to win the 2014 Costa First Novel Award, a Betty Trask Award, and Italy’s Premio Salerno Libro D’Europa prize. It was shortlisted for the Jarrold New Writing Award, the Independent Booksellers Week Awards, the Desmond Elliott Prize, The Times Breakthrough Award, and the Blackwell’s Book of the Year Award, and was longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize and the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction. Vendela (pictured) is the award-winning author of five books, including Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name and The Lovers, and is a founding editor of The Believer magazine. She is also the co-editor of Always Apprentices, a collection of interviews with writers, and Confidence, or the Appearance of Confidence, a collection of interviews with musicians. As a fellow at the Sundance Labs, she developed Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name into a script, which received the Sundance Institute/Mahindra Global Filmmaking Award. Two of Vida’s novels have been New York Times Notable Books of the year, and she is the winner of the Kate Chopin Award. She lives in Northern California, and since 2002 has served on the board of 826 Valencia, a nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting students ages 6 to 18 with their writing skills