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Literary fiction

Do literary novelists deserve public funding?

1 January 2018

The question of funding for literary fiction has been in the news recently and has attracted a range of different views, ranging from the feeling that literary publishers need this subsidy to be able to carry on, to Tim Lott's feeling that literary writers have lost the plot (literally).  Read more

Authors face declining incomes - should literary novelists receive more state support?

18 December 2017

Two of our links this week relate to the report just published by Arts Council England which looks at literary fiction and concludes that it is in sharp decline. A close look at the figures suggests however that literary fiction is not alone, the problem relates to fiction sales in general.  Read more

Big books in demand

14 December 2015

This article in the Guardian, Are books getting longer, shows that in both commercial bestseller lists and literary lists (measured by Booker Prize winners), the books that feature are tending to get longer. But this goes against a number of trends which you would expect to be pushing readers in the opposite direction.  Read more

Man Booker goes to stunning (and persistent) Jamaican Marlon James

12 October 2015

This week's story was to have been on the rise in support for short stories, until, that is, Marlon James had his stunning Man Booker Prize win last night.  Read more

A 'diverse and international' Man Booker longlist

3 August 2015

The longlist for this year's Man Booker Prize is both diverse and international, with a wide range of different kinds of writers and a number of debuts. The longlist features three British writers, five US writers and one each from the Republic of Ireland, New Zealand, India, Nigeria and Jamaica.  Read more

Funding literary writers

26 May 2014

In an article in the print edition of the Bookseller, Philip Gwyn Jones offered a clear-sighted analysis of the current model of funding literary writing. He is the former publisher of Granta, a very highly-regarded editor with masses of experience in this area and the independence currently to call it like it is.  Read more

The Man Booker Prize goes global - in English

23 September 2013

The Man Booker Prize's decision to accept novels from American authors, providing that they are published in the UK, has been arrived at after a series of consultations lasting over the last eighteen months. How they could have expected to keep their ruminations quiet is not clear.  Read more

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6 August 2020 - What's new

August 2020
  • 'Well, the first six weeks I was not doing any writing at all. It was all about making sure the kids were all right and everyone was in a good mental state. Then, I thought maybe I can work for an hour or two a day and it was really hard work getting back in the groove. But, hey, the books aren't going to write themselves.
  Read more

2020 Manchester Writing Competition

Information

Closing date: 
18 September 2020
Entry: 
Open to writers across the world. Entry fee £18
Prize: 
Two £10,000 prizes are awarded: the Manchester Poetry Prize for best portfolio of poems and the Manchester Fiction Prize for best short story

The Manchester Writing Competition offers the UK's biggest literary awards for unpublished work, offered by the country's most successful writing school. The Competition was established in 2008 by Carol Ann Duffy (UK Poet Laureate 2009-19) and has awarded more than £195,000 to writers.  Read more

'Rejection slips, or form letters, however tactfully phrased, are lacerations of the soul, if not quite inventions of the devil - but there is no way around them.'

— Isaac Asimov