New Writing

Anna Metcalfe and Thomas Morris, two graduates of the UEA Creative Writing MA, have been included in the 2023 Granta Twenty Best Young British Novelists selection. Anna (pictured) graduated from the MA in 2012 and from the PhD in Creative and Critical Writing in 2016. In 2014 she was the youngest writer ever to be shortlisted for the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award, and in 2016 her debut collection of short stories, Blind Water Pass, was published by John Murray. Her first novel Chrysalis will be published by Granta in May. She teaches at the University of Birmingham. Thomas graduated from the Creative Writing MA in 2013 and is a former editor of The Stinging Fly. In 2014 he edited Dubliners 100, a centenary collection of new short stories by Irish writers based on James Joyce’s Dubliners, and in 2015 Faber & Faber published his debut collection of stories, We Don’t Know What We’re Doing, for which he received a Somerset Maugham Award. The collection won the Wales Book of the Year Award and The Rhys Davies Trust Fiction Award and was shortlisted for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize. His second book of stories, Open Up, will be published by Faber this August. Previous UEA alumni to be included in the Granta selections are Rose Tremain (BA 1967), Clive Sinclair (BA 1969, PhD 1983), Ian McEwan (MA 1971) and Kazuo Ishiguro in 1983; Kazuo Ishiguro again in 1993; Toby Litt (MA 1995), Susan Elderkin (MA 1994) and Ben Rice (MA 2000) in 2003; and Naomi Alderman (MA 2003) and Adam Foulds (MA 2000) in 2013.