2020 looks set to be very special for these four writers…
Deepa Anappara, published her debut novel, Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line, last month. The book has already won the Lucy Cavendish Fiction Prize, the Deborah Rogers Foundation Writers Award, and the Bridport/Peggy Chapman-Andrews Award for a First Novel. It is now being translated into 17 languages.
Deepa’s short fiction has won the Dastaan Award, the Asian Writer Short Story Prize, the second prize in the Bristol Short Story awards, the third prize in the Asham awards, and has been broadcast on BBC Radio 4. She has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia, Norwich, where she is currently studying for a Creative-Critical Writing PhD on a CHASE doctoral fellowship.
Deepa Anappara’s debut novel
Harriet Tyce published her debut crime novel Blood Orange in 2019 to critical acclaim, with The Observer calling it ‘Complex and menacing…a very impressive debut.’ Blood Orange was shortlisted for the Dead Good Reader’s Award and selected for Richard and Judy’s bookclub choice in December 2019. Her second novel, Lies You Told – think Motherland meets noir – is due out in July.
Kiare Ladner will publish her debut novel, Nightshift, in July with Picador. Associate publisher Ravi Mirchandani described the novel as “an immensely exciting debut.”
Kiare’s short stories have been published in anthologies, journals, commissioned for radio and shortlisted in competitions, including the BBC National Short Story Award 2018. She won funding from David Higham towards an MA (Prose Writing) at the University of East Anglia, and then received further funding for a PhD (Creative Writing) at Aberystwyth University. She was given Curtis Brown’s HW Fisher Scholarship in 2018.
Last but not least, Hannah Begbie will publish her second novel, Blurred Lines, in June. Hannah published her debut novel, Mother, in 2018 with HarperCollins. Mother went on to win the Romantic Novelists’ Association Joan Hessayon Award for new writing and was made Book of the Month on Mumsnet and a pick for Fern Britton’s inaugural Book Club for Tesco. It has since been optioned by the BAFTA-winning Clerkenwell Films for adaptation into a television drama.
Congratulations to all four of these astonishingly talented women!