Northern Writers’ Awards 2024

New Writing North celebrated its 25th anniversary with an awards ceremony honouring writers in fiction and poetry. As part of the Northern Writers’ Awards, the Arvon Award was presented to Laura Tisdall.

“I’m so delighted to have won the Arvon Award! Of course, I can’t wait to have a week of focused writing time at one of Arvon’s beautiful writing houses, but I’m especially overjoyed at this support and validation for my creative work. It means the absolute world.” 

Laura lives in Northumberland with her springer spaniel. She writes socially-informed sapphic fiction that intersects with the weird, strange and uncanny. Her current novel-in-progress, New Mothers, is about a group of teenage girls living in an isolated Wiltshire hamlet who discover that their fathers have murdered their mothers and replaced them with robots. Laura was the runner-up in Hodderscape’s SF Debuts Prize in February 2023, shortlisted for the Word Factory Northern Apprentice Award for short fiction in July 2023, and won second place in the Surrey New Writing Prize in May 2024. Laura is a senior lecturer in modern British history at Newcastle University. Her historical research on childhood, adolescence, parenthood and second-wave feminism inspired New Mothers. She is also currently writing a crossover non-fiction book for Yale University Press London, which will tell the history of Cold War Britain through the voices of children and teenagers. 

Congratulations to Laura and all the winners at the Northern Writers’ Awards!