Saturday 11 June 2016

Winner of the Julia Darling Travel Fellowship 2016


The winner of the Julia Darling Travel Fellowship has been announced:

 
      June 2016
Announcing the winner of Julia Darling Travel Fellowship 2016
Michelle Green wins the Julia Darling Travel Fellowship 2016
We are thrilled to announce that Manchester writer Michelle Green has won the Julia Darling Travel Fellowship 2016.
 
The fellowship is worth £2,000 and is to assist a writer to undertake a period of travel, which will inform their creative work. New Writing North established the prize in 2015 in conjunction with the family and friends of the late writer Julia Darling.
 
Michelle Green is a British-Canadian writer who works in and around Manchester. She began writing spoken word poetry in 2001, with a focus on economy, working class experiences, and queer lives. Her work has been published in a number of anthologies and broadcast on BBC Radio 4. Her debut poetry collection, Knee High Affairs, was published in 2005, followed by a critically acclaimed short story collection, Jebel Marra, in 2015.
 
The fellowship will allow Michelle to spend three weeks in Hayling Island, which lies off the south coast of England and which is the setting for a new collection of short stories.  She describes the island, once a bustling seaside resort, as “a place of contradictions” and writes that “the shuttered seafront strip is now full of the ghosts of many past lives. I am drawn to its contrasts and resilience, as I know that’s often where interesting stories sit.”
 
Of being awarded the Julia Darling Travel Fellowship 2016, Michelle Green said:

"I’m absolutely thrilled to have been selected for this fellowship, particularly knowing that it exists to honour a writer who, among many other things, produced scathing, funny, full-hearted work about something so human, something I’m learning myself—how to be a whole person in a brittle body."

Florrie Darling, Julia Darling’s daughter and one of the founders of the Julia Darling Travel Fellowship, said:

"It might not be the obvious choice of destination for a travel prize but Julia would have loved the idea of taking an ordinary working class seaside town as your inspiration. We set up the Travel Fellowship to celebrate Julia by supporting other writers to develop their work and creativity and we liked that Michelle’s application had something of Julia’s quirky spirit and determination”.

Claire Malcolm, chief executive of New Writing North, said:

“Michelle is the perfect writer with the perfect project for the fellowship this year. Although we don’t usually encourage our northern writers to move South we are happy to support Michelle to undertake a short visit to develop ideas to fuel her work. Julia would have liked the idea of a residency in a British seaside location. The fellowship is there to support writers to go wherever they need to go to develop their ideas”.

Michelle was announced as the winner on Sunday night at Rendezvous: Wish You Were Here, a celebration of the life and work of Julia Darling at Live Theatre, Newcastle. The event also helped fundraise for the prize, which is crowd-funded and supported by many fellow writers.

To support the continuation of the Julia Darling Travel Fellowship, see the JustGiving page.

To find out more about Julia Darling, see juliadarling.co.uk
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© New Writing North 2016

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