Rathbones Folio Prize and University of East Anglia Join Forces in Creative Writing Partnership
The Rathbones Folio Prize and the University of East Anglia (UEA) today announce a new partnership that will see exceptional authors championed by the ‘writers’ prize’ offered a £5000 visiting fellowship by UEA. Hot on the heels of being awarded the 2020 prize for Lost Children Archive (in a digital ceremony on Monday), Valeria Luiselli, will be the second writer to be offered the fellowship, a fixed term position in UEA’s world-renowned school of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing. The first, 2019’s winner Raymond Antrobus, takes up his position, albeit remotely, this spring.
The announcement comes just ahead of the University’s anniversary marking 50 years of its landmark Creative Writing MA.
The UEA/Rathbones Folio Creative Writing Fellowship will take place for a fixed term each spring. This year, in exceptional circumstances, Raymond Antrobus will deliver a programme of digital masterclasses, online panel discussions and tutorials for UEA students in May. It follows an unprecedented year of honours for the 33-year old writer whose debut The Perseverance was the first poetry collection to win the Rathbones Folio Prize and went on to win the Ted Hughes Prize, Sunday Times Young Writer’s Prize and a Somerset Maugham Award, as well as well as being shortlisted for numerous others.
The partnership package will also include a special Rathbones Folio Sessions programme taking place in London and Norwich offering students at UEA and the public access to the insight and expertise of the Rathbones Folio shortlisted authors. The dynamic literary event series will feature members from the distinguished and award-winning writers in the Folio Academy. As an extension of the partnership, UEA Creative Writing faculty member and writer Dr Jean McNeil now joins the Folio academy, alongside colleagues Professor Henry Sutton, Director of Creative Writing and Professor of Creative Writing, Tessa McWatt.
Andrew Kidd, co-founder of the Rathbones Folio Prize said: “We are delighted to announce this new partnership with UEA, in what has been an extraordinary week for the prize. As a literary award, we seek to identify the best work, across all forms and borders, of any given year. But we also recognize that this work doesn’t emerge from a vacuum, and the Rathbones Folio Mentorships are designed to find and nurture new voices, while the Rathbones Folio Sessions offer those voices a platform on which to flourish. Working with UEA, we see a unique opportunity to build on these initiatives, connecting the talented, aspiring writers identified by its celebrated creative writing programme with the world-class writers comprising the Folio Academy. We look forward to an evolving and fruitful partnership.”
Dr Jean McNeil, Reader in Creative Writing at UEA went on to say: “UEA has a long tradition of awarding creative writing fellowships to the most exciting voices of our time, offering our students the opportunity to meet and be mentored by some of the world’s leading contemporary writers. In recent years, UEA’s extraordinary programme has welcomed writers from all over the world, including Sharlene Teo, Ayòbámi Adébáyò and Deepa Anappara. In its inaugural year, we could not be more pleased to welcome Raymond Antrobus to this first Rathbones Folio Creative Writing Fellowship. As we prepare to mark 50 years of UEA’s pioneering creative writing MA, we are delighted to be working with the Prize to continue making our programme the leading global choice for aspiring writers.”
Raymond Antrobus said: “I am honoured and excited to begin my fellowship at UEA. I am hoping to inspire as well as be inspired by students and faculty members.”
As the only prize governed by an international academy of distinguished writers and critics, the Folio Academy, the Rathbones Folio Prize ensures an unrivalled quality and consistency and awards the very best writing of any given year. It is borderless and open to all genres – fiction, non-fiction and poetry – and strongly invested in spotting talent and building a greater diversity and variety of voices in our literary culture.
UEA pioneered the teaching of world-class creative writing in the UK and has produced more published and prize-winning authors than any other UK institution including Ian McEwan, Kazuo Ishiguro, Anne Enright, Naomi Alderman, Tash Aw and Ayòbámi Adébáyò. Its equally impressive roster of teaching staff and visiting professors include Margaret Atwood, Rose Tremain, Angela Carter, and Lorna Sage.
The university’s CW50 anniversary programme will launch officially on 1 October 2020. Other planned activities include the five-year International Chair of Creative Writing and Global Voices scholarships programme, a flagship Future and Form exhibition (spring 2021), a re-branded literary festival programme, UEA Live, symposiums and further national and international events.
Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli was announced as the winner of the 2020 Rathbones Folio Prize on 23 March.
Notes to Editors
About Rathbones Folio Prize
The Folio Prize was established in 2013 as the first major English language book prize open to writers from around the world. It is the only prize in which all the books considered for the prize are selected and judged by an academy of peers. When new sponsors, Rathbone Investment Management, came on board the prize was expanded to include all works of literature, regardless of form. Previous winners were George Saunders in 2014, Akhil Sharma in 2015, Hisham Matar in 2017, Richard Lloyd-Parry in 2018 and Raymond Antrobus in 2019.
About The Folio Academy
The Folio Academy is a community of 300+ writers who represent excellence in literature. Academicians include: Margaret Atwood, Carol Ann Duffy, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, Zadie Smith and Sir Tom Stoppard. The Academy recently recruited members including Amanda Foreman, William Dalrymple, Jon Ronson, Alan Johnson and Andrew Marr. Between them, Academicians have won thousands of literary awards, including 16 Man Booker Prizes. Academicians may be called upon to comment on literature matters in the media, to appear at festivals and public events, and may volunteer to mentor young writers in association with the charity First Story, which runs 320 residencies in secondary schools serving low-income communities.
About the University of East Anglia
The University of East Anglia (UEA) is a UK Top 25 university and is ranked in the top 50 globally for research citations. Known for its world-leading research and good student experience, it was awarded Gold in the Teaching Excellence Framework and is a leading member of Norwich Research Park, one of Europe’s biggest concentrations of researchers in the fields of environment, health and plant science.
About Creative Writing at UEA
The University of East Anglia pioneered the teaching of world-class creative writing in the UK and has produced more published and prize-winning authors than any other UK institution. Ian McEwan was the first student on the University’s MA and its unrivalled list of alumni includes Kazuo Ishiguro, Anne Enright, Naomi Alderman, Tash Aw, Ayòbámi Adébáyò, Emma Healey, Louise Doughty, Neel Mukherjee, John Boyne and Tracy Chevalier. It’s equally impressive roster of teaching staff and visiting professors includes Margaret Atwood, Rose Tremain, Angela Carter, Lorna Sage, Andrew Motion, Amit Chaudhuri, Ian Rankin, Ali Smith and Caryl Phillips. In 2011, UEA’s creative writing programme was awarded a Queen’s Anniversary Prize for Further and Higher Education, the UK’s most prestigious Higher Education award, rarely given to a humanities subject.
www.uea.ac.uk/literature/creative-writing
