News from Centre for Writing students and alumni, September 2018

Current 2nd year student Gurnaik Johal has made the shortlist for The Guardian’s 4th Estate BAME Short Story Prize 2018. Johal's story is entitled 'The Piano'. In the short story an elderly widower takes a creative approach to grief by leaving his dead wife’s piano out on the street for young lovers to play. The winner, who will receive £1,000, an exclusive one-day publishing workshop and online publication on the Guardian website, will be announced on 12 September.

Graduate Katherine Horrex is published in a new poetry anthology about animals, entitled Some Cannot be Caught: The Emma Press Book of Beasts.Katherine’s work is featured in an anthology of 35 poets in a collection which will allow every reader to ‘find something rich and strange.’ The anthology is published by the Emma Press and edited by Anja Konig and Liane Strauss.

MA 2018 graduate Joe Carrick-Varty has won the 2017/8 New Poets prize and is performing his poetry as part of The North 60 Launch event at Waterstones on 5 September, at 6.30pm. The event celebrates the 60^th issue of The North magazine and Joe performs alongside other Book & Pamphlet Competition winners and New Poets Prize winners.

Alumnus Kavita Bhanot has been shortlisted for the SI Leeds Literary Prize for Baba ji on Boulton Road. The SI Leeds Literary Prize is the award for unpublished fiction by Black and Asian women. The winner, runner-up and third place awards will be announced at the Prize award ceremony in Ilkley on Wednesday 3 October, featuring Prize patron and journalist Bidisha

2014 PhD graduate Jennifer Thorp has written the libretto for a new chamber opera Dear Marie Stopeswhich ran at the Wellcome Collection in London in August as part of Tête à Tête: The Opera Festival 2018. Dear Marie Stopes, by composer Alex Mills, explores the letters written to Stopes (now stored in The Wellcome Collection’s archives) in response to her controversial ‘sex manual’ Married Love, published in 1918. Extracts from the letters were carefully collated by Jennifer along with archivist and gender and sexuality expert, Dr Lesley Hall to create an opera which provides a ‘fascinating snapshot of a society’s sex life’.