J&A author Emily Haworth-Booth has been announced as the winner of the Mslexia Novel Competition for her work Mare.
Awarded every two years to the best novel, short story, poetry and flash fiction on offer, Mslexia cultivates a portfolio of competitions that have ‘propelled many women’s writing careers to the next level.’
Judge Sophie Hannah, author and writing coach, ‘loved' Mare. 'I was gripped by her first description. The concept and her approach to it are really bold – she just goes for it!’
‘I loved her playful approach and admired how she switched between prose and prose poems,' commented literary agent Sophie Lambert. ‘It sits outside the mainstream in a good way.’
Rounding out the trio of judges, literary critic Natasha Onwuemezi found Emily’s writing to be ‘incredible, wonderfully weird and thought-provoking. I loved its take on gender and physicality, and our proximity to the natural world.’
A keen animal lover, Emily was inspired to write Mare when issued a prompt to write a poem about desire during a writing course. ‘I wrote a love letter in second person to this horse I was looking after. It started off based on my own experience, but got longer and more fictional as I worked on it, going from second to third person, then to first person narrated by a fictional ‘I’ that wasn’t me any more.’