The Winner of the Emerging Writer Award 2019 was Hannah Kelly, a writer and artist living in Edinburgh. She leads a small youth work charity on the outskirts of Edinburgh and teaches art at the National Galleries of Scotland. Her pen and ink illustrations have been exhibited locally and published in the UK and abroad. But mostly, she writes.
In 2018 she was shortlisted for the Brighton Prize for Short Fiction and the JuxtaProse Literary Magazine International Short Story Competition. In 2017 she was selected to read one of her short stories at the Edinburgh International Book Festival as part of the StoryShop showcase for new writers.
“The support and advocacy of Moniack Mhor is such an encouragement to me and my work in progress,” commented Hannah, on new of her award. “But really, that’s a very mature way of saying that I danced around my living room for twenty minutes after they phoned me. I write to explore and ask questions. My stories are often a ‘stretching out,’ of the things in the world that are already slightly improbable or strange. Synaesthesia. Instagram filters. The nature of morality in a post-truth society. My fiction is a place where I can bring those ideas out, illuminate them beneath different lights and look for fresh perspectives.”
In October 2020, Hannah gave us the following update: “This year has been extraordinary, thanks completely to The Bridge Awards and the Moniack Mhor Emerging Writer Award. Last summer I was given choices about what the prize could look like and opted for a professional mentorship and two writing retreats. I was paired up with Jenny Brown, who over the course of the year helped me get my novel manuscript ready to go out on submission. Jenny has a reputation for being brilliant, kind and insightful, and she was all of those things in abundance. My time away at Moniack Mhor in March really helped me focus on my edits and having the momentum and encouragement of the Award throughout lockdown, when it was so hard to write, really kept me going. Awards like this can be so instrumental in the journey of a writer, it’s having someone read your work and say ‘yes, keep going, this has potential’. It makes all the difference in the world.
“At the beginning of this month I completed my mentorship, and a week later submitted my novel to literary agencies. Within a week of submitting I signed a contract with Victoria Hobbs of A.M.Heath, who represents some of my writing heroes. I am so excited about the next stage of the journey and so grateful to The Bridge Awards for supplying the environment, the encouragement and the finance to get a book out of my head and onto the page.”
Jenny Brown commented: “It’s been a joy to work closely with Hannah Kelly as she edited her brilliant debut novel and prepared it for submission. I particularly valued the structure of the mentoring programme which allowed us to meet and also to keep in touch by phone, email and, latterly, Zoom, over a number of months as the manuscript developed.”
Find out more about Hannah on her website, www.hannahkelly.co.uk
The judges identified the following five writers as Shortlisted for the Emerging Writer Award 2019 :-Sharon Jennings, Sukh Brar, Jeda Pearl Lewis, Susan Elsle. Shola von Reynolds