The GWN at the Cheltenham Literature Festival

This year's GWN winners and runners-up

What a great evening on Sunday! This year the Gloucestershire Writers' Network event at the Cheltenham Literature Festival saw a packed venue, with a very appreciative audience supporting the winners and runners-up in the annual poetry and prose competitions and listening to fantastic readings by Lania Knight and Roy Macfarlane, our two judges. Sorry as I was to part with the Poet's Hare (who had graced my writing desk for the last twelve months), I was delighted to present him to Frances March, the winner of the poetry section with her evocative "1956 : Sheltered". And Nastasya Parker's short story, "The Maze", was a well-deserved prose winner, beautifully and poignantly exploring the "Who do we think we are?" theme of the Festival.

From the work that they both read - Lania from her novel "Three Cubic Feet" and Roy from his collection "Beginning With Your Last Breath" - it was obvious that we could not have chosen better writers to judge a competition based around perceptions of identity.  We'd presented them with no small task; we'd had a bumper crop of entries, all of a very good standard. We're immensely grateful to them for the big commitment of time that the work entailed and for the care with which they approached the task.

With Frances March

Nastasya Parker

With Lania and Roy and my GWN committee colleagues
Penny Howard, Kathryn Alderman and Judith Dijkhuisen