New Writing

Four UEA alumni have recently received Northern Writers’ Awards. Penny Boxall and Sam Buchan-Watts have received awards for poetry of between between £1000 and £5000 to support them in developing their current works-in-progress. Penny (pictured) graduated from the UEA MA in Creative Writing (Poetry) in 2009. Her debut collection Ship of the Line was published in 2014. She published her second collection Who Goes There? earlier this year, and was also the winner of the 2019 Poetry Book Society / Mslexia Women’s Poetry Prize. Sam graduated from the MA in Creative Writing (Poetry) in 2014, and won an Eric Gregory Award that same year. He was published in the Faber New Poets series in 2016. Current MA Creative Writing (Prose Fiction) student Melissa Wan has meanwhile received the Word Factory Apprentice Award to develop her short stories, for which she will receive mentoring from Carys Davies, a £1000 bursary, and the opportunity to be considered for publication by Comma Press, while Sarah Corbett has received the Andrea Badenoch Fiction Award, which is for female writers over the age of 42 years old. Sarah graduated from the UEA MA in Poetry in 1998 and is currently a Lecturer in Creative Writing at Lancaster University. She is the author of four books of poetry, including The Red Wardrobe (1998), which received an Eric Gregory Award and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize and the TS Eliot Prize.