Announcing our Landmarks Flash Fiction Competition winner & runners-up! |
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To celebrate the landmark moment of 300 Curtis Brown Creative students securing commercial book deals, we invited writers to share flash fiction with us inspired by the theme of ‘Landmarks’. We’re delighted to announce the winning stories selected from over 250 entries. |
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The winner of the competition is Zelda Cahill-Patten with her charming and bittersweet short story 'Invisible Smiths'. Zelda has been awarded a £300 Curtis Brown Creative gift voucher and a year-long membership to The Writing Studio (worth £240). |
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Our runners-up are Kate Safford Banks for her story 'Seahenge' and Hannah Cushion for her story 'The Green Lady'. Both Kate and Hannah have won six months of access to The Writing Studio (worth £150). |
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We’ve published the winning and runner-up stories on our blog, and hope you’ll find them as captivating as we do! |
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'I wanted to write something with ritual and tradition woven through it' |
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Laura Evans was a student on our London Writing Your Novel – Six Months course in 2014. We caught up with her to discuss her views on unreliable narration, her horror reading recommendations and the folkloric influences that inspired her debut novel Little Wild – out now with Mantle (Pan Macmillan). |
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Little Wild sits in the space between gothic horror and magical realism. Do you have any tips for writers trying to create a magic system that feels believable? I wanted magic to creep up on Margaret, as so much else does over the course of her story; and for it to be at times ambiguous, to the reader and to Meg herself, whether what’s happening is really magic at all. I won’t pretend I made a conscious decision to write a ‘soft’ magic system; I didn’t set out to write a system at all, and maybe that’s the point. To me it feels more convincing to have a magic system we learn about by prodding the edges of it and guessing at its shape, than one that appears on the page fully formed. |
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‘Rewrite, and rewrite again until it feels true’ |
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In this interview Rukky Brume, Discoveries 2021 longlistee and author of It Comes in Waves (out today with Merky Books), shares her advice for writing authentically about grief and bringing settings to life. |
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What advice would you give to writers who want to explore grief in their work but are struggling to write about it with authenticity? I take authenticity here to mean writing something that feels true. Whether you’ve experienced grief or not, authenticity comes from study, writing and re-writing. By ‘study’, I mean reading/observing/ researching widely on grief. By ‘writing’, I mean allowing yourself to do it badly. Let it feel untrue at first. Then rewrite, and rewrite again until it feels true. |
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Introducing our autumn scholarships |
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The Jen Eve Taylor Novel-Writing Scholarship for Disabled Writers |
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This scholarship, in memory of Jen Eve Taylor, will award one talented disabled writer a free place on our three-month online Writing Your Novel course. The course will run from 7 Sept to 18 Dec 2026. Jen Eve Taylor was part of the inaugural Breakthrough Writers’ Class of 2021 and was awarded a place on our Novel-Writing Course for Writers with Low Income. We’re proud to run this scholarship in her memory with the support of her loved ones. |
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HW Fisher Novel-Writing Scholarship for Writers with
Low Income |
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This scholarship, sponsored by HW Fisher, will award one talented writer of limited financial means a free place on our flagship Writing Your Novel course with three months of teaching in London. The course will run from 15 Sept to 15 Dec 2026. |
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Last chance to join our Writing Your
Synopsis – Masterclass!
1 Evening | Zoom | £65 'Richard was very engaging and the teaching was clear and logical. Practical tips on how to write the synopsis and an inside look at what agents look for or discard! Great class.' – Patti Parsons, former student Struggling to summarise your story? Learn how to write the perfect one-page synopsis for your pitch package during this two-hour masterclass. Richard Roper, novelist and former senior commissioning editor at Hachette, will guide you through the tricky art of writing a synopsis step by step and answer your questions. Join us on Thurs 2 July, 7pm to 9pm (UK time). |
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Curtis Brown Creative Cunard House 15 Regent Street London, Greater London SW1Y 4LR |
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