New Writing

UEA student Sharlene Wen-Ning Teo has won the inaugural £10,000 Deborah Rogers Foundation Writers’ Award, which was established in honour of the literary agent who died in 2014 and is intended to support writers from the UK and Ireland in completing their first books. Sharlene (pictured) is a Singaporean writer based in the UK who joined the MA in Creative Writing (Prose Fiction) at UEA as the recipient of the Booker Foundation Scholarship in 2012. After graduation she was the 2013-14 David T.K. Wong Creative Writing Fellow at UEA, and a Fellow of the Sozopol Fiction Seminar. She is currently in the second year of her PhD in Creative and Critical Writing at UEA, and won the Deborah Rogers Award for her novel Ponti. Her writing has previously appeared in such publications as Esquire, Magma Poetry and Eunoia Review. Another UEA writer, Imogen Hermes Gowar, who graduated from the MA in Creative Writing in 2014 was shortlisted for the Award for her novel, The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock, while Divya Ghelani, a 2007 MA graduate, was longlisted for her novel Runaway. The Award received 885 entries.