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news and features
HWA Crown Award Winners 2025
The winners are:Gold: The Heart in Winter by Kevin Barry (Canongate Books)Non-fiction: Moederland by Cato Pedder (John Murray)Debut: A Poisoner’s Tale by Cathryn Kemp (Bantam) Read more about the books and the shortlisted titles on... more
Dorothy Dunnett / HWA Short Story Competition 2025
The winning and shortlisted stories! Huge congratulations to our winner, Sean Lusk, our Highly Commended writers, Alex Edwards and Joseph Dragovich, and the writers of our shortlisted stories, Liz Kershaw, Sopie Lenoir, and Elaine... more
Dorothy Dunnett Society / HWA Short Story Competition Longlist
Many congratulations to the writers of our longlisted stories. The shortlist and winning stories will be announced on Friday 3 October! We ended up with nearly 150 stories this year and the standard was extremely high. Many thanks to our first... moreauthor showcase
Theresa Shiban
Theresa Shiban was born and raised in Los Angeles, but has been a Londoner for most of her life. She has worked as a theatre director, installation artist and playwright. Her plays have been produced at the Soho, Union and Young Vic theatres and Barts Hospital. She has had attachments at the National Theatre Studio, poetry and play commissions and writing residencies at Barts Hospital and BDP architects. She is passionate about art,... more
Amanda Cockrell
Amanda Cockrell is the author of Are You Now or Have You Ever Been? a novel of the Hollywood blacklist; Coyote Weather, a novel of the Vietnam War era; and the young adult novel What We Keep Is Not Always What Will Stay. Writing as Damion Hunter, she is the author of ten Roman novels: Hadrian's Eagles, The Borderlands series, concluding with Birds of Prey; The Centurions series; The Legions of the Mist, and its sequel The Wall at the Edge... more
Richard Woulfe
Richard has had two short stories published in Postbox, a Scottish arts magazine. Another story won the Hastings Book Festival LGBT+ prize 2024. Previously, two radio dramas of his were produced, one by RTE Radio, the other by The Wireless Theatre Company. Both plays can be found online. Richard is from Limerick, and now lives in London, where he achieved a history MA at Birkbeck. Master Secretary is his first novel. He is currently writing a... more
Shona Parker
Hello everyone! I am a writer of Victorian history, which I have always loved, and the favourite part of my degree – a BA (Hons) in Technical Theatre Arts – was researching the historical contexts of the plays I was working on. By majoring in set and costume design, I was able to indulge my passion for social history whilst creating beautiful backdrops and gorgeous costumes to reflect the settings and the characters. After qualifying... more
