Two recent UEA graduates, Tahira Yaqoob and Lindsay Michiels, have been named as the recipients of this year’s £1,000 Curtis Brown Award, which is awarded annually to the best student on the UEA Creative Writing (Prose Fiction) MA, as chosen by a panel of Curtis Brown agents.
Tahira (pictured) is a Fleet Street journalist and the 2021/22 recipient of the Kowitz Scholarship for Creative Writing at UEA. She has been a runner-up twice in the Mogford International Short Story Prize and was longlisted for Penguin’s WriteNow scheme in 2020. In her journalistic career, she has covered crime, politics, news features and special investigations for 30-plus international publications, including the Daily Telegraph, The Times, The Washington Post and the Daily Mail. She has reported from Colombia, Pakistan, India and the Middle East, where she lived for more than a decade, as well as the UK. Many of the stories she has covered inform her creative writing, with its themes of race, class, identity, migration and dislocation.
Lindsay is a writer from Holland, Manitoba, Canada, whose short fiction has been a top-10 finalist of the 2020 Bridge Prize, long-listed for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, and published in The New Quarterly. She was the recipient of UEA’s 2022-23 Seth Donaldson Memorial Bursary. In addition to prose, Lindsay has also written three original plays that have been performed by the Brandon University Theatre Club, one of which was selected for a dramaturgy by the Manitoba Association of Playwrights.
