A Creative Writing student from the University of Chichester is celebrating a hat-trick of triumphs in the competitive world of short fiction.
Juliet West, who graduates in October from the MA Creative Writing course, began her flurry of success in the national H.E. Bates Competition, winning the £200 First Prize with Beauty in the Bog, the vivid tale of a poetry-loving teenager on the tough streets of London.
Her prize was awarded in front of a large audience at Northampton Library, the home county of H.E. Bates.
Juliet followed this with success at this year’s Winchester Writers’ Conference, where Fifty Six Minutes of Freedom was Highly Commended in the ‘shorter short story’ competition.
To put the icing on the cake, a third story, Rarely Visits Gardens, has been accepted for publication in a forthcoming anthology from Two Ravens Press, an independent publisher based in Scotland. The stories in the anthology all have a gothic flavour, and a link with birds. The anthology is being edited by the author Nicholas Royle, who spoke at the University of Chichester conference on ‘The Uncanny’ in February 2009.
Juliet, who works part-time as a copywriter, said that she was delighted to see the stories find good homes in the literary world.
As a mother-of-three who now lives in Horsham, she says that Fifty Six Minutes of Freedom is set in her old home town of Worthing, with various mentions of the Downs, while Rarely Visits Gardens is loosely set in her family’s back garden, inspired by the appearance of a redwing during the snow in January this year.
The latter story gained publication after Juliet retained occasional email contact with Nick Royle following his successful appearance at the ‘Uncanny’ event at the University.
“He encouraged me to submit a story for possible inclusion in the anthology,” explained Juliet. “Gothic isn’t a genre which I’m naturally comfortable with, but I learnt a great deal during the ‘Metaphor and the Imagination’ MA module, which gave me the confidence to experiment.
“As for ‘Fifty Six Minutes of Freedom’, it was one of the first short stories I attempted several years ago. I dusted it off and re-drafted earlier this year, changing the tense and the period (from past to present, 1970s to contemporary). This seemed to give the story fresh energy, and I’m pleased with its success!”
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