How do you feel your school will benefit from holding a mini BWA competition?
"The BWA will provide an audience for talented, inspirational writers. Enhance and celebrate the status of creativity and writing"
James O' Connell
Head Of English
Lipson Community College
We need to involve all children in having the opportunity to write creatively and for pleasure, involving teachers and parents will be an additional motivation. S Bahra
Head Of English
Waverley School
"Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart" - William Wordsworth
Welcome to the Brit Writers' Awards
Update on 28/07/2010:Brit Writers’ Awards Unpublished 2011: now open for submissions!
We’re happy to tell you that we’re now accepting submissions for BWA Unpublished 2011. The official deadline is 5pm (UK time) on Friday 25 February 2011, but we’re closing the competition once we receive 20,000 submissions. Learn more and enter your work now!
The ceremony for the Brit Writers' Awards Unpublished 2010 took place on Thursday 15 July and our first ever Unpublished Writer of the Year was crowned! Former teacher Catherine Cooper from Shropshire won the £10,000 prize for her children's novel The Golden Acorn: The Adventures of Jack Brenin - and we took the liberty of publishing it as a surprise for Catherine...
The other winners were:
Short stories: 16 and under Fifteen-year-old Sacha Burgess from South London for her story ‘What Lies Beyond’.
Poetry: 16 and under Ten-year-old Emily Madden Forman from Stratford upon Avon for her poetry collection ‘Laugh Out Loud!’
Non-fiction Dorset mum and breast cancer survivor Katherine Locke for her non-fiction book, Six Women on Twelve Walks.
Songwriting: adult Sixty-nine-year-old former cathedral chorister Nigel Hanson for his song ‘An Empty Day’.
Songwriting: 16 and under Schoolgirl Freya Ridings (who will soon be attending the prestigious BRIT School) for her song ‘Doubt’.
Short stories: adult East Dulwich writers’ group member Helen Hardy (who couldn't be there to collect her award as she'd given birth that day to her first baby!) for her short story ‘Crush’. Congratulations on both accounts, Helen!
Poetry: adult One of Carol Ann Duffy’s MA graduates, David C. Byrne, for his poetry collection ‘Foreign Bodies’.
Novels Bronx-born Pamela Vincent (who divides her time between London, Hove and Sussex) for her novel Swamps and Marshes.
The Brit Writers' Awards Unpublished 2011 is looking for the UK's best undiscovered writers - people like you, who create stories, poems or songs that deserve to be shared.
You might have been writing all your life... or maybe writing is a new interest for you. Perhaps you've never written seriously before, but you've always enjoyed telling stories. You might not even know that there is "a book in there somewhere".
Whether you're eight or 108, it's possible that you're one of the original, exciting and talented new creative writers we're looking for. You could even win an amazing£10,000 - the largest prize ever offered to unpublished writers in a creative writing competition.
