Innholdsfortegnelse for May 2025 i Writing Magazine

As writers, we don’t live in isolation (though sometimes we might wish we did!) We’re part of the culture and society that exists around us and writing has always been our way of making sense of changing elements within it, responding to questions about who we are and how we live, and exploring our anxieties. Genre fiction – popular fiction – is often where we see contemporary issues and preoccupations reflected. Whether you write it or not, being interested in how we write the world we live in is vital if you want to create work that resonates with your readers. And publishers want books that are relevant, and strike a chord with the reading public. In this month’s issue, leading practitioners outline writing the hot trends that have emerged…

When I first started writing my novel Smoke and Silk, I must admit to being a purist. It was so important for me to write about historical characters who really existed. To hit a note of originality in your writing, find some people in history you find intriguing, who are not particularly well known and focus on them. Take the matchgirls’ strike of 1888 in Limehouse, London. For many years I believed that Annie Besant, the journalist and women’s rights campaigner, was the mover and shaker of this industrial movement. But thanks to reading Louise Raw’s book Striking a Light: The Bryant and May Matchwomen and their Place in History, the truth was even more compelling. Besant is fairly well known, but what about the real dynamos behind the strike…

Annabel Streets is a full-time writer. Her fiction and non-fiction books have been translated into more than thirty languages. She also writes for a number of newspapers and magazines. ‘I’m an as-and-when writer,’ she says. ‘I don’t stick to a rigid schedule but write around the rest of life. I always start the day with a walk of around 45 minutes to a coffee-serving bakery that opens at 7.30. I’m usually the first customer and arrive with a proper china cup. I then follow a route through a cemetery where I inspect a couple of different graves every day. Almost everyone in the cemetery died in middle-age and many are buried with their dead children. It’s a salutary reminder that I’m very lucky to be alive. Any gripes or worries…

STAR LETTER KARMA COMES CALLING I read with interest Lynne Hackles’ article titled Words as weapons (Novel ideas, WM March). Like Lynne, I was raised to be courteous, and find it difficult to upbraid people in real life. Generally I am not a revengeful person either, and have yet to murder any of my characters. However, a school bully I knew in my youth has reappeared as a scheming girlfriend in one of my stories. No one would ever recognise her as I have changed her appearance and nationality, but she displays exactly the same haughty, sneering attitude. Similarly, an arrogant former boss has been reincarnated as a controlling husband and father with criminal links. Writers have a possibly unique power to devise the form and extent of fictional karma.…

There has always been a dim space at the end of the landing. Wedged between two sash windows, both showing silver sky, it is a place where darkness appears more concentrated. When we first moved in, there was talk of mounting a light on the wall – one of those flame-shaped bulbs that betrays its modernity by never flickering when a draft sneaks through the gaps in the windowpanes. But in the end, we decided to give the space over to itself. Can whole years be dark? If so, our first year here was a dark year, blanketed from start to end, with only faint glimpses of sun. We painted the walls buttermilk yellow, hung mirrors in corners so that faux corridors unfurled, but the space on the landing became…

Being able to write clearly and accessibly is essential for writers who want their work to be widely read and understood. That’s a given. But it can also be the key to transforming people’s lives. Can accessible writing really do that? ‘All the time!’ Cathy Rentzenbrink says. Before she became a Sunday Times bestselling author, Cathy helped her illiterate father to read, which led her to the role of project director of The Reading Agency’s Quick Reads scheme. Each year, The Reading Agency commissions six Quick Reads: short, accessible, entertaining, and affordable books (retailing at £1) from bestselling authors, with the ambition to get people who struggle with reading to pick up a page turner, as well as entice lapsed readers back into the habit. During her time at Quick…

I recently attended the London Book Fair 2025 at Olympia, London, which continues to be a pivotal event in the publishing calendar. As part of my role within Cornerstones, I closely monitor genre trends and it was fascinating to hear agents making predictions about book market directions. There are shifting sands in response to changing reader preferences, successful outliers and world events, and a savvy author looking for a book deal would do well to have an awareness of what agents are seeking out. The focus on genre is a clear directive for agents because it helps them narrow down the type of market a book will appeal to and guide their decision-making when it comes to selling a book into publishers. Agents constantly track which genres are popular at…

Women’s Prize longlist The 2025 Women’s Prize for Fiction longlist has been announced as: Good Girl, Aria Aber; The Ministry of Time, Kaliane Bradley; Somewhere Else, Jenni Daiches; Amma, Saraid de Silva; Crooked Seeds, Karen Jennings; All Fours, Miranda July; The Dream Hotel, Laila Lalami; The Persians, Sanam Mahloudji; Dream Count, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie; Nesting, Roisín O’Donnell; A Little Trickerie, Rosanna Pike; Birding, Rose Ruane; The Artist, Lucy Steeds; Tell Me Everything, Elizabeth Strout; The Safekeep, Yael van der Wouden; Fundamentally, Nussaibah Younis. The shortlist will be announced on 2 April, and the winner of the £30,000 Prize on 12 June. Chair of Judges, Kit de Waal said, ‘These are important, far-reaching novels where brilliantly realised characters navigate the complexities of families and modern relationships, whilst pushing the boundaries placed…

Merganser Magazine Merganser Magazine is a free online monthly literary magazine which debuted last winter, writes Gary Dalkin. Editor Jake Ott is looking for fiction, creative non-fiction, poetry and visual art. There are no hard editorial guidelines, as the editor is eager to find strong, well-written pieces across a wide range of material. That said, shorter works and those suitable for online reading are prioritised and you are advised to avoid long paragraphs. Anything over 2,000 words is likely to be a hard sell. You can submit as many poems or prose works as you like, though the title is unlikely to accept more than one piece from the same contributor in a six-month period. All submissions must be original, preferably in standard manuscript format. Simultaneous submissions are fine, but email…

Algorithms being what they are you do not have to express much online interest in writing to be besieged by offers of help. This comes, in my experience, in two forms: help in getting published and help in improving the quality of your writing. I will leave the first on one side, not least because most readers of this journal will know the dangers of vanity publishing. But the other is worth a word. Of course, writing is an ongoing learning experience. Nothing wrong with that: I like that my writing changes and develops as I take in knowledge and advice from a variety of sources. But formal instruction can be a hazard and a distraction – and it is certainly not a magic formula. In an idle moment I…

Penny Blackburn lives in North East England but is originally fromWestYorkshire. She writes poetry and short prose around her day job as a teacher in FE and is proud to have work published in a wide variety of journals and anthologies. Her poetry collection, Gaps Made of Static, was published by Yaffle Press in 2023. started with a seabird. A dead one. I didn’t realise any of that at first. It wasn’t until there were more – a dozen herring gulls, a score of terns – that anyone noticed anything. But really, it was easy enough for people to ignore. The ebbing tide would clear away the debris quickly enough. But daily there were more and more. Plovers, dropped like stones on the wet sand; kittiwakes, cormorants. Each beaded eye…

There are different kinds of themed memoir. In a recent article, we looked at stories which carry an extra non-fiction strand, such as Nigel Slater’s Toast: The Story of a Boy’s Hunger and next month we’ll look at memoirs about knowledge or skills the author has gained through study, practice and sometimes training, but this article focuses on the most common kind, memoirs that share wisdom, which is to say, lessons from life. This kind of memoir is often driven by a desire to help other people who are going through similar difficult experiences. Sometimes the advice and ideas might be foregrounded, but other times the story will be allowed to carry the ideas, and no explicit advice will be offered at all. I think of sharing this kind of…

My gateway drug into writing was chocolate. Aged seven, I wrote a story in class and won the school prize of a plastic vending machine that spat out miniature chocolate bars when you fed in coins. I’ve always loved reading. During secondary school I developed an addiction to crime fiction and worked my way through Agatha Christie’s back catalogue. For entertainment I’d make up murder plots in my head and map out complex twists. I even bought myself a typewriter with my pocket money. It felt natural that I’d go on to university to study English, maybe become a journalist. Definitely churn out a few bestselling novels at weekends. None of that happened. My chaotic teenage behaviour meant that I flunked my exams and lost my university place. Instead, I…

Each month in WM, we feature creative writing by our subscribers. Selected pieces will be published in WM and we pay £50 for prose and £25 for poetry, and provide a mini-critique explaining what made the pieces stand out to us. This month’s issue takes a look at genre fiction and how it can address the world we live in, so this month we’re inviting 'Genre' submissions that use genre writing to tackle something you feel strongly about. You can write in any genre but please mention which one on your submission. Submit prose up to 500 words and poetry up to 40 lines to wmsubmissions@warnersgroup.co.uk. Include your subscriber number. The closing date is 30 April. Next month, look out for the pieces we’ve selected from the submissions call in…

As someone with fast, fragmented and obsessional thought processes, I 100% lack consistency in my approach to writing books. This could be seen by some, I imagine, as a bad thing, perhaps even an unhealthy thing, but I’ve found that, as long as I can channel the mayhem, it works well enough for me! I can respond to the plotter/pantser question differently depending on the day, and I often have at least three different stories whirring around my head all at once. It’s disorganised chaos but, as soon as I hit the keyboard and the words start coming out, they tend to fall into place pretty quickly. Some I plot carefully, others I just write a pivotal scene for and build something around it. There are, however, three ingredients I…

When and where did your journey as an author begin? It was when I pursued a master’s degree in creative writing. I realised my creativity had been dormant for some time, both at work and at home. Reflecting on my childhood and twenties, I was always creating – drawing comics, developing characters, and writing stories. Writing has always been a part of who I am. It was just overshadowed by life. What is (or has been) your proudest moment as a writer? My proudest moment wasn’t seeing my book in print, but realising readers could connect with my characters. Hearing someone say, ‘I love how Rosemary pretends to be frail to deceive others,’ filled me with pride. Rosemary had lived in my mind for so long that I forgot she now…

ACTUAL INTELLIGENCE FROM SANDI TOKSVIG On 25 February the government’s controversial Consultation on Copyright and Artificial Intelligence came to an end, Gary Dalkin writes. The day before, Writers’ Guild of Great Britain President Sandi Toksvig OBE wrote on the guild’s website, first setting out how currently copyright means writers get to decide how their work is sold, licensed or otherwise used: ‘But … the Government has stated that it prefers a very different model – one where writers, creators and other rights holders will need to reserve their rights, or ‘opt-out’, to stop AI companies from accessing the work and using it to train their models. ‘There are a whole host of issues with this. The first is the principle – that this is a fundamental change to how copyright…

Air and Nothingness Press The editorial team at Air and Nothingness Press seek stories for an anthology to be titled Mmeory, which will be a collection of stories about memory manipulation. Stories, 1,000 to 2,000 words, must deal with manipulation of memory through something like ‘magic spells, cyborg memory edits, very unreliable narrators, time travel gone horribly wrong and so on.’ Check all the details at the website. The team pay $0.08 per word. PDRLS Website: http://aanpress.com Strange Legacy: 2025 Editor M. Keaton is publishing a continuation of the Strange Aeon anthology series, Strange Legacy: 2025, writes PDR Lindsay-Salmon. This horror anthology needs stories about the creatures, both traditional and original, which terrify people. Scare level should be like the ‘early Weird Tales, no excessive language or explicit sexual references.’…

Indigo Spring Poetry Prize 2025 The Indigo Spring Poetry Prize from Indigo Dreams Publishing is an open competition for original, unpublished poems in any style or form, up to 40 lines. The prizes are £250, £100 and £50, plus publication. The judge is Victoria Gatehouse. The entry fees are £5 for one poem, £9 for two and £12 for three. The closing date is 30 April. Website: https://indigodreamspublishing.com/competitions Ware Poets Open Poetry Competition 2025 Win an £800 first prize in the contest that will be judged by Hannah Copley. Enter original, unpublished poems up to 50 lines. The prizes are £800, £400 and £200. There is also a special Sonnet Prize of £200 for the best sonnet submitted. Winners and shortlisted entries will be published in an anthology. The entry…

Jane Gregory Bursaries 2025 Applications are now open for the Jane Gregory Bursaries, which offer three under-represented writers a unique opportunity to attend the Creative Thursday writing day at the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival 2025. Creative Thursday, an immersive and inspiring day of workshops and talks led by industry experts and bestselling crime writers including Vaseem Khan, Mick Herron, Will Dean and Laura Shepherd Robinson, takes place on 17 July 2025, the opening day of the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival in Harrogate. The Jane Gregory Bursaries were created to support the next generation of crime writers, offering recipients the opportunity to access the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival. One of the bursaries incorporates a Weekend Break Package with accommodation and tickets to all Festival main…

Jessica Kingsley Publishers Jessica Kingsley Publishers is a London-based company founded in 1987 as an independent publisher, and is now part of Hodder & Stoughton Limited, writes Gary Dalkin. They publish books on: arts therapies; autism and neurodiversity; bereavement; healthcare; inclusive teaching and learning resources; gender diversity and sexuality; social work and social care; mental health and counselling; parenting; race, ethnicity and culture; religion; culture and values. JKP has won numerous awards, including Independent Book Awards, British Book Awards and Moonbeam Children’s Book Awards. They publish books for children, teenagers, schools, self-development, parents / carers, as well as academic and textbooks, and now include the original JKP imprint as well as Singing Dragon (complimentary health, including acupuncture, nutrition, Pilates, yoga, etc.) and Handspring Publishing (bodywork and movement). They publish some…

Swing Swing is part of ‘a thriving organization, The Porch, which is ‘a gathering place for writers’ and provides an ecosystem for writers at any stage in their practice. Submit one to five poems in all types and length and liteary fiction and non-fiction, no more than 8,000 words. No AI. Website: www.porchtn.org/swing The Lemonwood Quarterly The Lemonwood Quarterly publishes short stories and plays. The team want ‘superbly written stories and play pieces between 2,000 and 10,000 words.’ Currently they need stories with female protagonists who are well into adulthood. Payment: ‘All of our contributors receive an honorarium for their work’ currently about US$200. Website: https://lemonwoodquarterly.com Phano Phano publishes speculative fiction, 1,000 to 5,000 words, which ‘provokes a sense of wonder, touches an emotional core, centres on well-developed characters, and…

In space, we are told, no one can hear you scream. This I think is the experience many authors feel they have sending out their work to agents. The rejections are bad enough, but the thing that makes the process so utterly agonising is the silence. The lack of feedback. But what no one ever tells you is that feedback itself can be incredibly hard to receive. We all long for people to love our work. The trouble is, it just isn’t that simple. That’s not an agent’s job. To use a date metaphor, it’s one thing to be told that someone thinks you are gorgeous, it is quite another to be told they think you are gorgeous but you could do with losing a few pounds and that your…

Lurking in the shadows,Hiding from the light;Crouching, creeping, crawling,Waiting for the night. Skulking in the shadowsHungry, thin and mean;Hunting in the darkness;Heard but seldom seen. If you hear a whisperWhen there’s no one near,Never stay to listen.One just might appear. If you see a movement–Something small and grey–Never try to follow.Turn and walk away. Don’t go out at midnightStrolling in the park.Nothing good will be thereProwling in the dark Keep out of the cupboards.Don’t look in the shed.Never reach for itemsUnderneath the bed. If you feel a presenceLike a breath of air…Just imagination?Nothing’s ever there.…

BEASTLY GOINGS ON I write ‘Zoodunnit’ murder mysteries, writes subscriber Phil Swan. That is right, ‘Zoodunnit’ murder mysteries. It is a new genre I have created and I am sure you will have never seen it before in this magazine. As you might guess, my books are set in a zoo. All the suspects are zoo animals and, spoiler alert, so is the killer!! The first book in my series, Waarter Catastrophe, was self-published. I have just completed the follow-up, Mercy, and I have a full outline ready for Book 3. These humorous Zoodunnit murder mysteries are aimed at adults. Set in a fictitious zoo, my books feature zoo animals as characters, detectives, and even the killer. The zoo, located on the grounds of a grand countryside hall, transforms into a…

The Yeovil Literary Prize 2025 The prestigious international contest is inviting entries in five categories. For this year’s awards, the prestigious international competition organised by Yeovil Community Arts Association is inviting entries in the following categories: • Novel: The prizes are £1,350, £450 and £200. The judge is Alison Barrow. Enter up to 10,000 words, including a 500-word synopsis, of an original, unpublished novel manuscript. The entry fee is £18.50. • Short story: The prizes are £625, £275 and £150. The judge is Nikki May. Enter original, unpublished short stories up to 2,000 words. The entry fee is £10.50. • Poetry: The prizes are £625, £250 and £150. The judge is James Crowden. Enter original, unpublished poems up to 40 lines. The entry fee is £8 per poem. • Children/Young…

Cranked Anvil Flash Fiction Competition 2025 The next deadline in the quarterly contest is 31 May 2025. The Cranked Anvil Flash Fiction Competition is for original, unpublished flash stories up to 500 words, on any theme or genre. There are prizes of £100 and £50. The winners will be published online. The entry fee is £5 for one, £8 for two and £10 for three. Website: https://crankedanvil.co.uk/flashcomp/ Ironclad Creative Short Story Competition 2025 The contest is inviting writing that responds to the theme of ‘Planted’. Stories for the Ironclad Creative Short Story Competition may be in any style or genre, up to 6,000 words. All entries must respond to the ‘Planted’ theme and be original and unpublished. There are prizes of £100, £50 and £25, and the winners will be…

Sundress Publications Sundress Publications publishes chapbooks and full-length works as well as a variety of online journals, writes PDR Lindsay-Salmon. For full length fiction the editorial team seek quality fiction and nonfiction. To submit a full length work or chapbook read the detailed guidelines at the website. Sundress Publications is also the umbrella site for numerous publications including the Best of the Net Anthology, Stirring, ‘Rogue Agent, Doubleback Review, beestung and Stirring : A Literary Collection. The team welcome submissions of creative work from all writing genres and a variety of visual art media. Check the individual submissions guidelines for each journal. Sundress Publications has an out of print books imprint and the team are happy to publish books from small, independent presses which deserve an encore. Authors whose work…

Bath Children’s Novel Award 2025 The international £5,000 annual prize is for unpublished and independently published writers for children. The winning author will receive £5,000 and all shortlisted writers will receive a compilation of Junior Judges’ comments on their manuscript. One longlisted writer will win a place worth £1,980 on the online Edit Your Novel the Professional Way course from Professional Writing Academy and Cornerstones Literary Consultancy and Writing Academy. Writers may be unpublished, self-published or independently published. Entries may be novel or chapter book manuscripts, novels for teens, or picture books. To enter, submit the first 5,000 words and a synopsis. Picture book writers may submit the text for three books for a single entry fee. The entry fee is £29.99. There are sponsored places available for writers on…

In today’s digital world, reviews play a crucial role in shaping purchasing decisions, particularly for self-published authors. Reviews provide credibility, increase visibility and help books gain traction on platforms like Amazon and Goodreads. However, getting reviews can be challenging without resorting to paid-for options. Here are some effective strategies to encourage readers to leave feedback. Include a call to action in your book or on marketing materials Encourage readers to leave a review by including a call to action at the end of your book. Thank them for their time, explain how reviews support independent authors and provide direct links to platforms like Amazon and Goodreads. Promotional materials such as bookmarks and leaflets can also reinforce this message with a simple line like, ‘Enjoyed this book? Help others discover it…