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Awards Archive

Major Research Awards

Major AHRB Award for 'Moving Manchester / Mediating Marginalities': Written Narrative and Immigrant Identity in Greater Manchester since 1960 

The AHRB has awarded the 'Mediating Marginalities' project £356,547 over 3 years 6 months.  Led by Professor Lynne Pearce (Department of English and Creative Writing), Dr Robert Crawshaw (Department of European Languages and Cultures) and Dr Graham Mort (Department of English and Creative Writing), this project will explore the processes whereby specific immigrant communities in the Greater Manchester area have employed - and continue to employ - written narrative (e.g., fiction, poetry, autobiography, drama, screen-play, multi-media installations) to define and affirm their identities.  In close collaboration with The Arts Council, local publishers and writers' groups, museums and holders of archives, the project will survey and catalogue the output, since 1960, of individuals and groups associated with Greater Manchester.  The project will also support the commissioning and presentation of new writing that employs narrative to 'mediate' immigrant identity within the region, including that produced by the 'Creative Writing' PhD student attached to the project.  During the life of the project - from Jan 2006 to July 2010 - Lancaster University, together with the various publishers and agencies associated with the scheme, will host a series of workshops, seminars and conferences in which academics, writers, publishers, arts' workers and members of the public will be invited to participate. 

Quaker Project receives British Academy Research Grant

The Quaker Project has been awarded a British Academy Larger Research Grant of £9698 for a pilot project on 'Quakers in North-West England and the Politics of Space, 1652-3'.

This will involve an electronic parallel-text edition of the three versions of George Fox's Journal for the years 1652-3 and an archive of images of significant Quaker places in the North West, both presented on a dedicated website, and two substantial scholarly articles on aspects of place and space, comparing Fox's account with other contemporary Quaker narratives.

The Project team consists of Dr Hilary Hinds, Professor Alison Findlay, Professor Emeritus Meg Twycross, and Professor Pamela M. King ( St Martin 's College). Associated with the Project are Dr Angus Winchester and Professor Mike Mullett (Department of History).

Other Awards

Leverhulme Research Fellowship awarded to Hilary Hinds

Dr Hilary Hinds has been awarded a six month Leverhulme Research Fellowship to work on 'George Fox and the Rhetoric of Early Quakerism'.  Dr Hinds' work on early Quakerism will result in a monograph to be published by Manchester University Press. In this, she examines the cultural impact of the doctrine of the indwelling Christ on the early Quaker movement.  Click here to see a pilot version of the website setting out the work of the early Quakerism project.

Paul Farley to receive E.M. Forster Award

Professor Paul Farley is to receive the 2009 E.M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters next month at the Academy’s annual Ceremonial in New York. Foreign Honorary Member E.M. Forster (1879-1970) bequeathed the American publication rights and royalties of his posthumous novel Maurice to Academician Christopher Isherwood (1904-1986), who transferred them to the Academy for the establishment of an award, now worth $20,000, to be given to a young English writer for a stay in the United States. Previous recipients include Seamus Heaney, Nick Hornby, Carol Ann Duffy, Bruce Chatwin, Julian Barnes and Jeanette Winterson. For more information visit the AAAL’s website www.artsandletters.org

Jerwood Award for Paul Farley

Professor Paul Farley (English & Creative Writing) has received the Royal Society of Literature's Jerwood Award for Non-Fiction. This prestigious annual prize (worth £5,000) is awarded to authors currently engaged with their first major commissioned work of non-fiction: the book Paul is co-writing (with Michael Symmons Roberts), 'Edgelands', is to be published by Jonathan Cape next year. Both authors received their award at a ceremony in London earlier this week.

Polly Atkin wins Troubadour Prize Polly Atkin, who is currently studying for a PhD in English at Lancaster University, has just won the Troubadour Coffee House Poetry prize. To read Polly's poem, go to Troubadour's Coffee-House Poetry site.

Zambian 'Crossing Borders' writer wins Commonwealth Short Story Prize Zambia's Ellen Banda-Aaku has won the £2,000 Commonwealth short story prize for her story Sozi's Box, about the thoughts of a young girl at her brother's funeral. The prize was established 11 years ago with the aim of increasing appreciation between different Commonwealth cultures. It is proving to be a nursery for star young writers, including the bestselling Nigerian Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, author of Half of a Yellow Sun. Ellen was a participant on the British Council/Lancaster University African writers project 'Crossing Borders' designed and led by Dr. Graham Mort from the Department of English & Creative Writing.

Graham Mort and Michael Carson, The Bridport Prize Graham Mort has won first prize in the prestigious international writing competition, The Bridport Prize, for his short story, "The Prince".  Michael Carson, tutor on the Distance Learning MA in Creative Writing, 2006-07, was a runner up in the short story competition.  Both stories are printed in the Bridport Prize 2007 Anthology. The 26 poems and short stories included in the anthology were chosen by Don Paterson and Tracey Chevalier from thousands of submissions.  Read more...

Former Lancaster PhD Student Nominated for Oldest Literary Prize

Ray Robinson joins the acclaimed authors Cormac McCarthy, Alice Munro and Sarah Waters in the shortlist for Britain's oldest literary award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prizes, awarded annually by the University of Edinburgh for the best work of fiction and the best biography published during the previous year.  His first novel, Electricity (which earned him his Creative Writing PhD in 2006) has been included in the list of six novels shortlisted for the £10,000 fiction prize.  Others on the shortlist are: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie; James Lasdun; Cormac McCarthy; Alice Munro;and Sarah Waters.  The James Tait Black Memorial Prizes are the only awards of their kind to be presented by a university anywhere in the United Kingdom (July 2007). Ray was also been awarded an Arts Council 'Time to Write' grant for twelve months to work on his third novel, Unfrozen Mind, a metaphysical murder mystery, the research for which will take him to the Himalayas, the Western Australian Desert and to the Arctic.

Graham Mort Wins International Award for Excellence in the Arts

Graham Mort has been selected as the winner of the International Award for Excellence in the area of the arts, for his paper “The Reflexive Muse:  Online Creative Writing Development in  Africa and the UK Academy”  (a paper delivered at the Edinburgh International Arts Festival, 15-18 August 2006 and published in The International Journal of the Arts in Society).

AHRC Award

Sally Bushell in collaboration with the Wordsworth Trust has been awarded an AHRC grant (April-July 2007) for 'From Goslar to Grasmere: Moving Through and Dwelling in Wordsworth’s Manuscript Spaces'. 

Lancaster Graduate Shortlisted for the Booker Prize

Sarah Waters (Lancaster University MA, 1988) was featured in the Independent and the Guardian, September 16, as her fourth book "Night Watch" has been shortlisted for the 2006 Man Booker Prize.

Lancaster Creative Writing Student wins the 2006 Yeovil Literary Prize

Sophie Duffy has won First Place for her novel, The Generation Game.  One of the Yeovil Literary Prize judges, Katie Fforde comments: "This is very powerful writing. You draw your reader in immediately and combine wit and poignancy to very powerful effect…Excellent."  Sophie Duffy says: "I started writing as a young mother of three children and have won a number of competitions and had a couple of short stories published. I wrote a novel for my MA in Creative Writing which I completed by distance learning at Lancaster. Last year, my family and I returned to my home town, Teignmouth, where I started work on The Generation Game in between haggling with builders and settling in three disgruntled children. Winning this prize has given me great encouragement to fulfil my ambitions of being a published novelist and doing a PhD."  Click here to read more about Sophie.

Joseph Conrad Sociey Award

Dr Michael Greaney has been awarded the 2006 Joseph Conrad Society of America's Adam Gillon Book Award in Conrad Studies, a tri-annual award given to a scholarly work voted, by our judges, to be the most significant.

PhD Student Gains Authors' Foundation Award

Lancaster University Creative Writing PhD student, Martin Goodman, has just received an Authors' Foundation Award from the Society of Authors. The grant supports research work on his biography, 'The Extreme Life of J.S.Haldane', bought by Simon & Schuster UK for delivery in December 2006. Research trips planned include forays down mines and sewers, to the summit of Pikes Peak in Colorado, and across the trenches of the First World War, as well as to the main cache of Haldane correspondence in the University of British Columbia.  For his PhD, Martin is working on a novel under the supervision of Graham Mort and Lee Horsley. Meanwhile a new novel, 'Slippery When Wet', is due out from Transita in January.

The Poetry Archive

Paul Farley is one of the inaugural poets featured on The Poetry Archive, the world’s premier online resource for readers, teachers, students and anybody interested in hearing poetry read. The Archive is a treasure-trove of English-language poets reading their own work. Some are historic recordings, some have been made specially for the Archive - which means its range is the widest possible: from Tennyson at the end of the c19, through poets such as Allen Ginsberg and Langston Hughes in the middle of the c20, to significant contemporary voices. You can enjoy listening free of charge. The Archive was launched on November 30th 2005 at the British Library. Visit the archive at www.poetryarchive.org

Forward Poetry Prize

Paul Farley has won the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem in memory of Michael Donaghy with "Liverpool Disappears for a Billionth of a Second". Farley won the Forward Best First Collection in 1998 with The Boy from the Chemist is here to see you (Picador) and was shortlisted for the prestigious Forward Best Collection prize in 2002 with his second collection The Ice Age (Picador). 

British Academy Award for 'A Literary History of Terrorism'

Dr Robert Appelbaum has been awarded a grant for £6300 by the British Academy as start-up funding for a long term project, 'A Literary History of Terrorism'.  The grant includes funds for research for a year plus funding for a research assistant.  The project aims to trace the literary dimensions of terrorism, developing the fundamental idea that the representation of terrorism has its own history.  By the end of the year, Dr Appelbaum will have compiled an analytic bibliography and completed work on the literary history of early responses to the Gunpowder Plot.

(1 July 2005)

Lancaster Alumnus Scoops Top Poetry Award

Joe Kane has won the prestigious 2004 Arvon Foundation International Poetry Competition with his poem The Boy Who Nearly Won The Texaco Art Competition. Born 1952 in Dublin , Joe studied ceramics and glass, opening a studio in Donegal in 1976. He completed the M.A. in creative writing (poetry) 2002 with Lancaster University . Joe has recently begun to submit poems to magazines and has been published in The Shop and Envoi. He has also been placed 3rd in The Patrick Kavanagh Awards 2004 and 2nd in The Smurfit Samhain International Poetry Competition 2004.

Lancaster Tutor is Among Top 20 Poets

Paul Farley, lecturer in Creative Writing is listed amongst The Arts Council's and Poetry Book Society's Top 20 best poets. In the Next Generation Poets project, Paul, whose collection of poetry The Ice Age (Picador) won the Whitbread Book Award for the best poetry collection of 2002, has been listed amongst writers widely acknowledged to be the most important voices of their generation. Lancaster Creative Writing MA alumnus Jacob Polley is also listed.

http://books.guardian.co.uk/nextgenerationpoets and http://www.poetrybooks.co.uk/book-template.asp?isbn=0330484532

(22nd June 2004)

Lancaster Tutor Wins Community Prize

Graham Mort, director in postgraduate studies for Creative Writing, has won the University staff prize for Community in recognition for his work in developing the Crossing Borders project. The project is funded by the British Council and based in the Department of English & Creative Writing at Lancaster , linking writers across Africa to mentors based in the UK . The project was cited as 'changing lives both in Africa and in the UK '. Graham's new book of poems, A Night On The Lash , will be published by Seren in Autumn 2004.

Medieval Theatre Book receives David Bevington Prize

Masks and Masking in Medieval and Early Tudor England by Professor Emeritus Meg Twycross and Dr Sarah Carpenter (University of Edinburgh), published by Ashgate, was recently awarded the international 2004 David Bevington Award for Best New Book in Early Drama Studies. The award was presented at the AGM of the Medieval and Renaissance Drama Society on 7 May 2004 at the International Medieval Congress, Kalamazoo .

Lancaster PhD Student Wins Writing Prize

Raymond Robinson, a Lancaster Creative Writing MA alumnus and PhD student, has just won the prestigious Philip Good Memorial prize for short fiction. Raymond is currently working on a novel - 'Electricity' - for his doctoral study at Lancaster  (June 2004).