An extract from Asun Álvarez’s historical fantasy mystery, Son of the Country. The year is 1589. In a world in which magic and the supernatural are part of everyday life, Martín de Salas, a survivor of the Spanish Armada with wolf-like abilities, is stranded on the West coast of Ireland on the brink of war. […]
UEA Creative Writing
True Things About You
An extract from Helen Marsden’s psychological thriller, True Things About You. PROLOGUE Naked, she lies on her side. She’s in the foetal position, then on her back. As she moves, her shiny, coral-pink toenails poke out of the pure Egyptian cotton sheets. Her smooth legs are still tanned from Barbados. She sits and stretches […]
2022 Prose Fiction MA anthology: foreword
Amit Chaudhuri’s foreword to UEA’s 2022 Prose Fiction MA anthology, published by Egg Box and available HERE My first experience of a Creative Writing department was the term I spent at Columbia University in 2002 (teaching not writing but literature and modernism at the department during a one-off stint). The students were intellectually open […]
UEA Creative Writing alumni achievements January – June 2022
A round-up of UEA Creative Writing alumni achievements in the six months from 1 January 2022: DEBUTS Sarah Barnsley (BA 1997) published a debut poetry collection. Cai Draper (MA 2018), Eve Esfandiari-Denney (current MA) and Imogen McHugh (current MA) published debut poetry pamphlets. Ferne Arfin (MA 1995), Jonathan Page (MA 1995), J.M. (Jacqui) Burgoyne […]
UEA prizewinners and nominees 1970 – 2021
The academic year 2020-21 marked the 50th anniversary of the UEA Creative Writing programme, which was launched in 1970-71 with a single student, Ian McEwan. Over the first fifty years of the programme a great many of its alumni achieved publication, and many of those won or were nominated for literary awards, including the Nobel […]
UEA Creative Writing alumni achievements July-Dec 2021
A round-up of UEA Creative Writing alumni achievements in six months from 1 July 2021 DEBUTS Lynne Bryan (MA 1985), Helen de Borchgrave (MA 2014) and Adam Andrusier (MA 2016) published debut memoirs. Emily Bullock (MA 2004) and Sonal Kohli (MA 2013) published debut collections of short fiction. Sean Gregory (MA 2010), Mona Arshi (MA […]
Time Stuck
A glimpse into Ewart Milne’s painfully intimate collection of poems. Ewart Milne’s Time Stopped is not a book: it’s an open wound. In a prefatory note, Milne calls this collection of poems ‘the story of the narrator’s life as seen in retrospect after the death of this wife.’ The problem is that Milne’s life stopped when […]
Here be dragons: a love letter
An extract from Ilona Bushell’s biography of Margery Allingham, The Beckoning Land. The first book by Margery Allingham I ever bought was Mystery Mile. It is a little Penguin classic with a green jacket, identifying it in the genre of ‘crime fiction’. Across the front is a white strip containing the title and the black […]
Blowing away the morning dew
An extract from Caroline Davison’s work in progress on how the true story of the brutal murder of a cabin-boy at sea was transformed into a musical evocation of rural Norfolk by one of England’s most renowned composers, Ralph Vaughan Williams. All with my garling spikk I misused him So shamefully I can’t deny […]
A Plaid for Lady Grange
An extract from a non-fiction work in progress, Shouting from the Edge of the World. In January 1732, Lady Grange was abducted from an Edinburgh boarding house. She recognised the men who wrestled her to the ground, bound her in cloth like a corpse, and tied her to the back of a rider on horseback. […]
