Competitions compendium

We can’t find a better competitions listing than that provided by The Poetry Kit. It covers short story and other creative writing competitions as well as poetry, so we suggest you bookmark it and visit frequently or – better still -sign up for their competitions newsletter (emailed on the first of every month).

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Wordsworth’s Dead! – read our latest newsletter

If you don’t subscribe to our e-newsletter, read the March issue here – Wordsworth’s Dead No.1 Mar 2010

To subscribe, email us at enquiries@newwritingcumbria.org.uk

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Cheap thrills in Orton?

Writers and readers are warmly invited to the Orton Scribblers Open Evening on Monday 8 March (7.30pm-9.30pm), discussing “Fiction and Non-Fiction” with thriller writer Zoe Sharp and Funny Farm resident Jackie Moffat. Bring your questions and join in the crack at Orton Market Hall.

Lake District-based Zoe Sharp is the author of the Charlie Fox crime thrillers Killer Instinct, Riot Act, Hard Knocks, First Drop, Third Strike, Second Shot and Road Kill. Ainstable’s Jackie Moffat is a columnist for Cumbria Life and author of The Funny Farm and Sheepwrecked.

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Naming Dusk in Dead Languages …

… is the title of Ulverston-based poet Gill Nicholson’s first poetry collection, deservedly praised by fellow Cumbrian poet M R Peacocke, who writes:

“Gill Nicholson writes about in-between states: she is ‘a woman who embraces dusk.’ The poems slip between light and dark, youth and age, past and present, what’s felt and what’s seen, without needing to urge the reader to take the point. At its best, there is an effortlessness in the writing which is rare. When you read that ’silence condenses over the tarn’, or that snow is ‘enough to smother currant bushes’, you are there at once in the place and the moment, listening.”

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News splash – Words by the Water programme change and tickets latest

Sad news trickling in from the watery words fest in Keswick, which wonderful nonagenarian memoirist Diana Athill (pictured left is no longer able to attend. Festival President Melvyn Bragg wades in to fill the vacant slot (now an hour earlier at 9.30am on Sunday 7 March) with a talk about the life and times of The South Bank Show.

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Words by the Water, 5-14 March

As one of his 10 Rules for Writing, published in The Guardian, playwright David Hare warned, “Never go to a TV personality festival masquerading as a literary festival.” Let’s hope he comes to Theatre by the Lake in Keswick then, where small-screen celebs are refreshingly thin on the ground at this year’s Words by the Water.

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