When I entered the inaugural Montegrappa Writing Prize at the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature in 2013, my goal was merely to have my work read by a top London agent. As an aspiring novelist, I spent most of my procrastination time Googling how difficult it was to get an agent, so the chance to have Luigi Bonomi of LBA actually look at my work was one not to be missed. I had only about 30,000 words of the novel at that point, but you didn't have to have a finished manuscript, so I wrote a synopsis, polished the first five pages, and sent it off.
I didn't expect to win, but I did hope that if Luigi saw anything, any shred of talent or promise worth developing, he might give me a nod. I was raising my head a little above the parapet for the first time in my fiction-writing life, and wondering: do I have what it takes, or is the idea of being a novelist just a ridiculous dream?
