In this Roadshow we will highlight one of our flagship awards, NorthBound, an opportunity made possible by the University of York and Saraband. Additionally, we’ll look at the wider context around writing being generated in the North and the opportunities for writers looking to find agents and publishers for their work.
The session will be chaired by Will Mackie, Senior Programme Manager at New Writing North, and speakers include Janine Bradbury, Catherine Simpson, Adam Farrer and Sara Hunt.
Janine Bradbury is an academic and poet and is Senior Lecturer in Literature at The University of York. Her critical work has been published by Bloomsbury and Palgrave Macmillan, and she has appeared on BBC Radio 4 Woman’s Hour and written for the Guardian. In 2020, Janine won a Poetry London Mentorship award and was shortlisted for the Oxford Brooks Poetry Competition. In 2021, she was nominated for a Jerwood Compton Poetry Fellowship. She is a co-organiser of the Ledbury Poetry Critics Scheme and a co-founding editor of BLACKLINES: A Journal of Black British Writing. Catherine Simpson is a novelist, memoir writer, short story writer and poet who was born and raised on a Lancashire farm and now lives in Edinburgh. Her memoir One Body, about how our bodies tell the stories of our lives, is forthcoming from Saraband in March 2022. Previously she has published a memoir When I Had a Little Sister , and a novel Truestory. She won a Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award for the opening chapters of Truestory. Her work has been published in various anthologies and broadcast on BBC Radio.Adam Farrer is winner of the NorthBound Book Award 2021. He is the Editor of The Real Story, an Arts Council England-funded journal and spoken-word event series, working to nurture emerging creative nonfiction talent in the UK. He has performed his work and led workshops on creative nonfiction writing at many arts and literature festivals across the north, including Manchester Literature Festival, Sheffield Doc/Fest, the Not Quite Light Festival, The University of Salford’s Festival of Research, the Northern Lights Writers’ Conference and Dave Haslam’s WAM Festival Manchester. His essays have appeared in numerous journals and publications, most notably in Test Signal in 2021. He currently works at the University of Salford, where he is the Writer in Residence for Peel Park.Sara Hunt founded award-winning independent publisher Saraband in 1994. Saraband initially specialised in non-fiction, but in 2011 literary fiction was introduced to the list, and Contraband, a sister imprint for crime, mystery and dystopian fiction, followed in 2014. Their titles have won or been shortlisted for dozens of awards, from the Booker Prize (shortlist 2016) to international awards (LA Times and others) and regional awards.
