New Writing

Two UEA alumnae have been longlisted for the inaugural Nature Chronicles Prize, an international literary award for essay-length nature writing. Anna Selby is nominated for ‘We Grieve Only for What We Know’ and Helen Baczkowska for ‘The Unbounded Land’. Anna (pictured) graduated from the BA in English Literature with Creative Writing in 2005 and from the MA in Creative Writing (Poetry) in 2006. She was the organiser of the Poetry Parnassus festival at the Southbank Centre in 2012 and co-edited The World Record anthology, published by Bloodaxe in 2011. Her first collection Field Notes was published by Hazel Press in 2020, and in 2021 she edited O, an anthology of poems about female sexual pleasure, also published by Hazel Press. Helen graduated from the MA in Biography and Creative Non-Fiction in 2021. She is an ecologist, writer and environmental activist living in rural Norfolk and regularly writes articles on local wildlife for Norfolk publications and for The Land magazine. In 2017 she published Beyond the Shingle Bank, a collection of poetry with photographs by John Volynchook, and in 2021(writing as Helen Beynon) she published an oral history of the road protest camp, Twyford Rising: Land and Resistance. Her essay Common Place was shortlisted for the 2021 Nan Shepherd Prize for nature writing.