My Novel an Eludia Award Finalist

Well, well, well, another piece of remarkably good news; my novel, The Cherrywood Box, is a finalist in the Eludia Award competition. It is particularly good news because I submitted the entire manuscript for this contest, rather than an extract, so it implies, to me anyway, that the entire manuscript has legs. The Cherrywood Box was highly-commended in last year’s Yeovil Prize and won a 2014 SLS fellowship. The Eludia Award is a U.S. contest, which is also rather interesting, because it would seem that it travels ok and I was wondering about that. I’m chuffed as you can probably tell. What a good week!

The list of semi-finalists and finalists was here but it appears to have been taken down.

I do have an update to this news. I won the 2013 competition, but since I’d started to submit to agents and was getting some positive responses, I decided to decline the prize because it included publication in a very small U.S. press and I only then realised that that was not what I wanted. It was a difficult decision and the organisers were very understanding and patient and have since reassigned the prize. I realise now that I should not have entered the competition in the first place. I’ve entered many short story competitions and I was treating this in the same way and of course a novel is very different creature.  I suppose, basically, I want it to be read. Writing is about communication, isn’t it? It’s also about commitment. I have invested more time, more of myself in the novels than my short stories so I can’t easily let them go.  It’s funny, because I never realised I felt like this about them before now. I feel the same way about self-publication.  I can’t imagine self-publishing any of my novels simply because they would, without the expertise of a publisher, be doomed to tumble amongst all the other pebbles on the beach.

Since the list of Finalists has been taken down,  here‘s is a screenshot of the email I was sent giving me the exciting news.