Announcement of winner of the 2018 Deborah Rogers Foundation Writers Award
The winner of the 2018 Deborah Rogers Foundation Writers Award is Deepa Anappara for Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line, a work of fiction. This was announced today Wednesday 16th May at a small ceremony in London. Anne Enright (Chair of the Judges) introduced the shortlisted authors and then announced the winner who was presented with the prize of £10,000.
The runners-up were Dima Alzayat for Daughters of Manat & Other Stories and Chris Connolly for The Speed of Light and How it Cannot Help Us. Both titles are collections of stories. The authors were each presented with a cheque for £1,000.
Anne Enright, Peter Hobbs and Jenny Uglow, the judges of the 2018 Deborah Rogers Foundation Writers Award, made their shortlist selection from a longlist of eight. This longlist was chosen by agents within Rogers Coleridge & White, after reading a staggering 752 entries.
The winner, Deepa Anappara is currently doing a PhD in Creative-Critical Writing at the University of East Anglia, Norwich. She has a Masters in Creative Writing (Prose Fiction) from UEA and previously worked as a journalist and editor in India. Her short fiction has won: the Dastaan Award, the Asian Writer Short Story Prize, the second prize in the Bristol Short Story awards and the third prize in the Asham awards. Her reports on education and human rights, published in newspapers and magazines in India, have won the Developing Asia Journalism awards, Every Human has Rights Media awards, and the Prabha Dutt Fellowship in Journalism. Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line won the Bridport/Peggy Chapman-Andrews Awards for a First Novel in 2017.
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Anne Enright, Chair of the Judges, comments :-
“The long list contained 8 original, formed voices, ready, or nearly ready, to take their place in the world. The variety was heartening, as was the urgency and precision these new writers brought to the page. Those on the shortlist were at the point in their writing lives when originality is met by craft: you can feel, as you read, the wind catching their sails. Dima Alzayat and Chris Connolly are on the cusp of terrific work, each has a distinctive take on the world, and a sense of place in their chosen literary traditions, producing work that is sometimes funny and always new.
The winner was unanimously chosen by the judges.
We care about these characters from the first page and our concern for them is richly repaid. This is story telling at its best – not just sympathetic, vivid, and beautifully detailed, but also completely assured and deft. Set in the slumlands of a sprawling Indian city, Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line is a modern tale that works an ancient seam of the story-telling tradition. Not many writers can make it look this easy. What a privilege to be one of Deepa Anappara’s early readers. There are many more to come.”
Gill Coleridge, Chair of Rogers Coleridge & White and Director of the Deborah Rogers Foundation, comments:
“We have once again been very excited to discover three extraordinary new voices representing the best of the diversity in contemporary new writing and feel privileged to read their work at the beginning of their careers. The great success of the first winners of the 2016 Deborah Rogers Foundation Writers Award has already brought distinction and renown to the Foundation and we are confident that the talented winners here tonight will enhance and continue that trajectory.”
The winner, Deepa Anappara, will appear on Sunday 27th May at the Hay Festival where she will join Ian McEwan on stage for the Deborah Rogers Foundation Conversation following his interview with Stig Abell, Editor of the TLS.
Note to the editors:
The 2018 Deborah Rogers Foundation Writers Award shortlisted authors:
DAUGHTERS OF MANET & OTHER STORIES
Dima Alzayat was born in Damascus, Syria, grew up in San Jose, California, and now lives in Manchester. Her stories have appeared in the Bristol Short Story Award Anthology, Prairie Schooner, Bridport Prize Anthology, and Enizagam. She was the winner of the 2017 Bristol Short Story Prize, the 2015 Bernice Slote Award, and a 2013 Highly Commended Bridport Prize. Her short story In the Land of Kan’an was included in artist Jenny Holzer’s projection For Aarhus and was part of Holzer’s 2017 exhibition at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. She is a PhD student and associate lecturer at Lancaster University.
DJINN PATROL ON THE PURPLE LINE: Winner
Deepa Anappara is currently doing a PhD in Creative-Critical Writing at the University of East Anglia, Norwich. She has a Masters in Creative Writing (Prose Fiction) from UEA and previously worked as a journalist and editor in India. Her short fiction has won: the Dastaan Award, the Asian Writer Short Story Prize, the second prize in the Bristol Short Story awards and the third prize in the Asham awards. Her reports on education and human rights, published in newspapers and magazines in India, have won the Developing Asia Journalism awards, Every Human has Rights Media awards, and the Prabha Dutt Fellowship in Journalism. Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line won the Bridport/Peggy Chapman-Andrews Awards for a First Novel in 2017.
THE SPEED OF LIGHT AND HOW IT CANNOT HELP US
Chris Connolly's fiction and poetry has appeared in the Irish Times, the Irish Independent, Southword, the Galway Review and the Hennessy Book of Irish Fiction, among others, and has been broadcast on RTÉ Radio. His work has won numerous awards, including Best Emerging Fiction at the 2016 Hennessy Literary Awards, the RTÉ Francis McManus competition, the Over the Edge: New Writer of the Year award and the Lascaux Review Fiction Prize. He was also highly commended in the Manchester Fiction Prize. He holds an MA in Creative Writing from UCD.
The 2018 Deborah Rogers Foundation Writers Award longlisted authors
- Julia Armfield – salt slow
- Dima Alzayat – Daughters of Manet & Other Stories
- Deepa Anappara – Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line
- Chris Connolly – The Speed of Light and How it Cannot Help Us
- P. Kearney Byrne – The Dreamish
- Rebecca Langton – Featherweight
- Tess Little – When we Called the Police to Collect My Ex-husband’s Body
- Francine Toon – Pine
The Judges
Anne Enright was born in Dublin, where she now lives and works. She has published two collections of short stories, published collectively as Yesterday’s Weather; one book of nonfiction, Making Babies; and six novels, including The Forgotten Waltz, which was awarded the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, The Green Road which was shortlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction 2016, the 2015 Costa Novel Award, longlisted for the 2015 Man Booker Prize, won the Irish Book Awards Book Club Novel of the Year 2015 as well as the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award 2016, and The Gathering, which was the Irish Novel of the Year, and won the Irish Fiction Award and the 2007 Man Booker Prize. She was the inaugural Laureate for Irish Fiction.
Peter Hobbs is the author of two novels, The Short Day Dying and In the Orchard, the Swallows, as well as a collection of short stories, I Could Ride All Day in My Cool Blue Train. He is also the coeditor of Sex & Death, an anthology of new short stories. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and a writer-in-residence for the schools literacy charity, First Story.
Jenny Uglow OBE is a former Editorial director of Chatto & Windus, and Chair of the Council of the Royal Society of Literature. Her own books include prize-winning biographies of Elizabeth Gaskell, William Hogarth, Thomas Bewick, and the Victorian architect Sarah Losh, as well as the acclaimed group studies, The Lunar Men: The Friends Who Made the Future, and In These Times: Living in Britain through Napoleon’s Wars, 1793–1815. Her latest book Mr Lear: A Life of Art and Nonsense is a biography of Edward Lear. She lives in Canterbury.
The Deborah Rogers Foundation Writers Award
The Deborah Rogers Foundation Writers Award was the first initiative of the Deborah Rogers Foundation, set up in 2015 in memory of the much loved and respected literary agent, Deborah Rogers. In keeping with Deborah’s special talent for nurturing and supporting emerging new writers, this £10,000 award is for a first-time unpublished writer whose work demonstrates literary talent and who needs financial support to complete their first book. The deadline for submissions was 13th December 2017. Entrants – who must reside within the British Commonwealth and Eire - were required to submit 20,000-30,000 words of literary merit of fiction, non-fiction or short stories, written in English. There were a total of 752 entrants, from which a longlist of 8 was chosen. The judges then selected a shortlist of three. The winner receives £10,000 and the two shortlisted authors £1,000 each.
The Award is biennial, alternating with the Deborah Rogers Foundation David Miller Bursary which offers work placements in publishing houses and agencies worldwide and £10,000 to cover travel and accommodation costs. The first winner, in 2017, was Sam Coates, senior rights executive at Vintage UK.