Portico Prize for Young Writers: Fiction.

The chosen pieces for the fiction strand of the Portico Prize for Young Writers:

Winner:
Ruth Baillie's "Liver Bird"

Runner up:
Rosalind Pearson's "Extreme Duck Feeding"

Highly Commended:
Viktoria Baraneckaja's "Deal with the Devil"
Joshua Chiles' "Untitled"
Jessica Clapson's "The Mess Up"
Rachel Dodd's "Untitled"
Bethany Frost's "Maleficium"
Poppy Graham's "A Place of Dreams"
Corwyn Hall's "The Darkness of the North"
Charlie Harris' "The Case of Mistaken Identity"
Robert Kaye's "A Night Time Wandering"
James Martin's "Winter Shadows"
Charis McKeown's "How Dreary is this Road I Walk"
Jason Neal's "The Last Device"
Vidya Ramesh's "Heights Short-Lived"

Commended:
Ruth Akinradewo's "The Unfailing Helper"
Harry Bowers' "Untitled"
Robyn Carty's "Mrs Potter"
Eleanor Dodds' "The Liver Bird Legend"
Isla Donohoe's "Outside"
Sarah Gilbert's "Untitled"
Miranda Gold's "The Diary of Emmeline Pankhurst"
Tia Harland-Say's "Invisible Threads"
Ella Langley's "The Buxton Line"
Saffron Lowsley's "Have You Seen Rosie?"
Shannon McCormack's "My First, First Day of High School"
Jessica McNamee's "The Boy with Biscuits in His Pocket"
Ella Nixon's "The Crimson Sky"
Daniel Price's "Martyrdom"
Artsiom Ramazanov's "Enex Tame"
Lloyd Williams' "Antonio"
Adam Woolley's "The Event Horizon"

"Big Writing for a Small World"

One of our regular researchers came in last week to continue her research on certain volumes in our collection, but before she headed down to the Reading Room she stopped to show us something...  It was a publication entitled Big Writing for a Small World which was launched in Manchester on May 1st and is organised in Manchester by English PEN with partnership support from Community Arts North West as part of their Exodus Greater Manchester Refugee Arts programme. The project was funded by John Lyon's Charity and the European Commission Representation in the United Kingdom.

Big Writing for a Small World is, as Jonathan Scheele states in his introduction "an ambitious cultural community project"  (p. 2).  The publication contains illustrations, short stories and poems in the English language by various contributors, all of whom speak English as a second language.  We were excited not only by the fact that our researcher is one of the contributors to this impressive collaborative work but by the publication itself and the amount of work that has obviously gone into it.

We are proud to have a signed copy of the book now in our collection and to be providing copies for sale on site.

Copies of Big Writing for a Small World are available at the Portico Library for £3 each.