 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.
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