News Archive

Academi Bursaries Bear Fruit

The application forms for the 2010 Academi Writers' Bursaries are now available to download from the Academi website. Academi Bursaries are available to new and published writers and children’s writers. Bursaries are also available for disabled writers in need of specialist equipment and assistance and the Miscellaneous Fund can offer small-scale support to help cover the travel or research costs of specific writing projects.

Each year the Academi Writers' Bursaries help writers throughout Wales take time out to work on, research and develop their work in-progress.

Earlier this year, Fflur Dafydd won the Oxfam Hay Prize for Emerging Writers 2009 for her first English novel Twenty Thousand Saints (Alcemi, 2008). Twenty Thousand Saints is a reworking and progression of her Welsh-language novel Atyniad (Y Lolfa, 2006) which won the Literature Medal at the National Eisteddfod in Swansea in August 2006. Fflur was awarded an Academi Writer’s Bursary in 2004-5, which resulted in these prize-winning novels.

This year has again seen the publication of a range of books written with the assistance of an Academi Writer’s Bursary. Poetry, prose, travel writing and fiction are all represented. Here are just a couple of the publications that have hit the shelves in 2009.

Chasing Dean (Summersdale, 2009) by Tom Anderson
Tom, who was led into a writing career through journeys taken as a surfer, was awarded an Academi Writer’s Bursary in 2007 to work on Chasing Dean. The book is a mixture of novel and travelogue, set in the USA against the backdrop of the Atlantic hurricane season.

Rooms (Shearsman Books, 2009) by Keri Finlayson
Keri received an Academi Writer’s Bursary in 2005. Rooms develops two intertwining narratives. In the first, the poet remembers and re-imagines her grandmother as a young woman, and the family stories that surround her, while the second concerns the history of film. Rooms is Keri’s first poetry collection.

The closing date for applications for a 2010 Academi Writer’s Bursary is:
Saturday 31 October 2009

Full guidelines and application forms are now available
to download from the Academi website.

Or contact Academi on:
029 2047 2266 / post@academi.org