Sue Peebles describes her experience of winning the 2011 First Book Award for her novel, The Death of Lomond Friel (Vintage):
I took to my bed. I had just got back from holiday and there were one or two email messages from Kirsty Logan at Creative Scotland saying she had some ‘exciting news’ about [...]
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Jackie Kay on winning the 2011 Non-Fiction Prize:
I was in my son’s bedroom; he was in terrible pain having just had ACL reconstructive surgery on his right knee. (He’d had a football accident in his year in Guadalajara whilst doing his Spanish degree.) Carol Ann and Ella were visiting him, and we were [...]
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My response is one of astonished delight, all the more heartwarming in that it is for this particular volume of poems. The bulk of them, from the title sequence to those which are self-evidently love-poems, were written from, and in the hope of touching, the heart. Allied to this there’s the question of [...]
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Leila Aboulela writes about winning the fiction category.
I was at home when I got the call telling me that Lyrics Alley had won the Fiction Award. I had just walked back from the gym and was going through my emails. The news was completely unexpected and a great honour. I was deeply [...]
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