Heather Parry was the winner of the 2016 Emerging Writer Award.
Heather Parry is a writer and editor who travelled widely for a few years before settling in Edinburgh. Her work has been published in a number of anthologies and magazines, and she is currently writing a novel about constructed reality, self-deception and self-awareness in the modern world. She writes about dystopias, utopias and real life, which is somewhere in between.
Heather’s entry was an extract from her novel-in-progress: Paper Faces. The story follows Will, a twenty-something paragon of the Millennial condition; over-educated, underemployed and plagued by both mounting debts and plummeting self-worth as he travels to an unnamed Latin American country.
The quality of applications was so high, it was decided to award a runner up and two highly commended pieces.
Runner Up – Sophie Cameron
Originally from the Highlands, Sophie Cameron is an Edinburgh-based writer focusing on young adult fiction. She has a PG Certificate in Creative Writing from Newcastle University and was previously a mentee on the WoMentoring Programme. Her writing has recently been shortlisted for the Bath Children’s Novel Award, the Caledonia Novel Award and SCBWI’s Undiscovered Voices 2016
Highly Commended – Flora Johnston
Flora Johnston is a freelance writer with a passion for Scotland’s history and culture. She has worked for over twenty years in historical research and interpretation, writing for exhibitions and multimedia. She has also published a number of factual books, including Faith in a Crisis (Islands Book Trust 2012) exploring famine, eviction and the churches in Uist, and War Classics (History Press 2014), the edited First World War memoir of her great-aunt. She is now seeking to draw on her knowledge of Scottish history in her first novel, Sackcloth on Skin, which is partly set in seventeenth-century Scotland. Flora lives in Edinburgh with her husband, two children and dog
Highly Commended – Agata Maslowska
Agata Maslowska was born in Poland and has lived in Scotland for over a decade. She has worked as an English teacher, a civil servant, and a freelance translator. Her fiction has appeared in Edinburgh Review, New Writing Scotland, and Scottish PEN’s New Writing. She has received the 2016 Hawthornden Writing Fellowship.