Somewhere Else writers, Iris Anne Lewis and Jim Moeller, took the stage at this year’s Cheltenham Literature Festival to showcase their prizewinning work on the theme of ‘Who Do We Think We Are?’.Both Iris and Jim had been shortlisted for a competition organised by the Gloucestershire Writers’ Network (GWN) and were delighted to be invited to read at the awards event, alongside the other shortlisted writers, poetry judge Roy McFarlane and prose judge Lania Knight.
Roy McFarlane commented that Iris’s poem Matryoshka ‘drew me into a dreamlike world where I might not have comprehended everything but it was dangerous; I loved “Flense her of flesh”, an arresting feast of words’. Lania Knight explained that the theme of the competition helped her decide the winners: ’The stories that made it to the final round answered this question of who do we think we are with humility, with grace and with insight’.
Jim’s story Benefits is featured as our November ‘Story of the Month’. All the shortlisted poems and stories are published in the competition winners anthology which is available from Penny Howarth at pennygwn@gmail.com. Please contact Penny if you would like to be included on the email list for writing news in the county and for details of next year’s GWN competition.
Somewhere Else Writers Group 