On Monday, 10th August, a panel of six judges will meet in London to decide the winners of our 2016 Writers in Residence programme.
The four successful candidates will win a month’s residency at Gladstone’s Library, a creative community that is open to the public and the world’s only residential library.
This year the judging panel includes:
Freddie Baveystock
When he’s not fulfilling his duties as a Trustee of Gladstone’s Library, Freddie is Strategy Director of digital branding agency Rufus Leonard. He holds a DPhil in early 19th century American Literary Culture from the University of Oxford, wrote his thesis on the romance of nationalism, and from discussions we’ve had with him over dinner, is a great fan of the novelist Penelope Fitzgerald.
Richard Beard
Currently shortlisted for the Guardian’s ‘Not the Booker’ prize 2015 for his most recent novel Acts of the Assassins – a novel he describes as ‘quantum fiction’ – Richard is a writer, translator, and the Director of The National Academy of Writing in London, UK. He was Writer in Residence at Gladstone’s Library in 2013.
Francesca Haig
Now a fulltime novelist, Francesca was previously Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Chester. A successful poet while gaining her PhD from the University of Melbourne and becoming an academic, her move away from academia was prompted by the global publishing phenomenon caused by her dystopian novel The Fire Sermon, the first in a planned trilogy. Francesca remains close to her academic roots as Visiting Writing Fellow at the University of Chester.
Sarah Perry
Described by the Telegraph as ‘a dazzling new talent’, Sarah is the author of After Me Comes the Flood, a debut novel that was nominated for the Folio Prize 2015 and won the East Anglian Book Award 2014. Sarah gained her doctorate from Royal Holloway in 2012 before embarking on life as a full-time writer. She has written for the Guardian, Independent, and the Spectator; her second novel, The Essex Serpent, will be published in July 2016.
Joining these will be Gladstone's Library's Warden, Peter Francis, and its Director of Collections and Research and academic, Louisa Yates.
The 10 shortlisted titles are:
Susan Barker, The Incarnations (Doubleday)
Sue Hubbard, The Forgetting and Remembering of Air (Salt)
Rose Collis, Death in the City (Hanover Press)
Rebecca Farmer, Not Really (smith/doorstop)
Alyson Hallett, Suddenly Everything (Poetry Salzburg)
Jason Hewitt, The Dynamite Room (Simon & Schuster)
Tung-Hui Hu, Greenhouses, Lighthouses (Copper Canyon Press)
Amy Liptrot, The Outrun (Canongate)
Katharine Norbury, The Fish Ladder (Bloomsbury Circus)
Natasha Pulley, The Watchmaker of Filigree Street (Bloomsbury Circus)
The 2016 scheme will be officially launched at an exclusive salon at London’s National Liberal Club on 12th October, where the four winners will read from their work, accompanied by previous Writers in Residence.