I am delighted to have been involved with the very first year of the Brit Writers’ Awards Unpublished, writing articles for the BWA website,  devising  creative-writing resources for schools and - in one of the hairiest, scariest weeks of my career - writing and editing the 68-page Write Now! event magazine in just five days.

(Thank you to the team at The Other Design Agency in Derby, who let me decamp to their office for a week and plague them with my obsessive attention to apostrophes!)

The inaugural awards ceremony took place on Thursday 15 July 2010 at Indig02 (The 02, London) and was hosted by the lovely Charlie Jordan and Tre Azam, who breathed life and sparkle into the script we’d drafted for them. Literary stars of the evening included Sir Terry Pratchett (pictured below, delivering his acceptance speech for the Published Writer of the Year award), while sponsors included The Reading Agency, Arts Council England and Faber Music.

This was all amazing. BWA was set up last year on a shoestring budget with the aim of shaking up the publishing industry (which can feel very inaccessible to outsiders), encouraging and inspiring people who might not normally have considered penning a story, poem or song. While there were many hurdles along the way (not least the 21,000 entries to read), the team did an amazing job in pulling together the glittering evening … and I’m sure I wasn’t the only one with tears in my eyes when overall winner Catherine Cooper heard that BWA had published her book (The Golden Acorn) in time for UK distribution this week!

I had a great time at the ceremony - and enjoyed the lovely company on my table, which included short story finalist Steven Tromans, Witchfinder author William Hussey and the team from the children’s division of Oxford University Press.

Now I’m happy to have got my BWA 2011 work well underway!

You can read more about the evening here.  

[Image of Sir Terry Pratchett included with permission from Brit Writers.]