Two UEA alumni, Kelechi Njoku & Linda Temienor-Vincent, have been selected alongside six other writers as winners of the 2023/24 National Centre for Writing’s Escalator programme, a talent scheme that provides mentoring and development for early-career fiction writers in the East of England. Kelechi Njoku (pictured) graduated from the MA in Creative Writing (Prose Fiction) in 2023 on a Global Voices Scholarship. In 2022, he was an inaugural fellow of the Rajat Neogy Editorial Fellowship with A Long House magazine and was mentored by the novelist Maaza Mengiste. In 2020, he was a writer-in-residence at Black Rock, a residency in Dakar, Senegal, established by American visual artist Kehinde Wiley. He has been shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, and previously won the Writivism Short Story Prize, West Africa region. His writing appears in adda, Litro, Brittle Paper, and This Is Africa. He lives in Norwich, and is completing a novel. Linda Temienor-Vincent graduated from the MA in Creative Writing (Prose Fiction) in 2022, also on a Global Voices Scholarship. She also holds a Bachelor of Education in English & Literature from the University of Benin, a Masters in Public & International Affairs from the University of Lagos, Nigeria, and a diploma in Screenwriting from the New York Film Academy. She won the Longlist Prize of the Bath Novel Award, and the Spotlight First Novel Award in 2023 for How to Marrie A Rich Man.