Northern Writers Awards 2024
A huge congratulations to Mixing Roots alumnus and Sheffield Young Writer Isabella Merino Garzon, highly commended in the 15-18 category of the Young Northern Writers Award 2024!!
“Being Highly Commended for the Young Northern Writers’ Award has given me confidence in my writing and inspired me to continue to pursue self-expression in this way. I am honoured the judges enjoyed my work and I can’t wait to see where the future of my writing takes me.”
Isabella Merino is a Venezuelan immigrant who explores her identity, culture and heritage through her writing. Taking part in the Mixing Roots Programme with Hive Young Writers allowed her to honour her homeland, explore her thoughts around being away from her family and write in Spanish, her mother tongue. Following the programme, she was published in Dear Life and We Are Everything and performed her poems at the Leadmill. She was runner up in the World Class Schools Essay Competition for her essay on friendship and has won the BBC Young Reporter competition for her article on food waste and inequality. She finds writing a powerful way to express her thoughts on the world and process the distance from her family and the tumultuous state of her home country.
More about the Northern Writers Award
The Northern Writers’ Awards are the largest writing development programme of their kind in England. Through these Awards, we’ve found hundreds of talented, often unpublished, writers – with a focus on supporting new work-in-progress.
We’ve provided writers with thousands of pounds worth of support and career-making opportunities – including help towards publication, mentoring, manuscript assessment, writing placements, retreats, and cash awards to buy time to write.
By supporting writers at an earlier stage than most literary awards – usually before an agent or publisher is involved – winning a Northern Writers’ Award can be life-changing for a writer at a pivotal stage of their career, as well as providing a pipeline of new talent to the publishing and broadcast industries.
The Northern Writers’ Awards are produced by New Writing North and supported by Northumbria University, Arts Council England, and a range of partners. As we celebrate our 25th Awards, we’d like to thank all our fantastic partners and sponsors over the years – none of this would’ve been possible without their help.
All of our current opportunities and an overview of our regular project work is detailed on our website at www.newwritingnorth.com. We publish monthly newsletters for writers, which you can subscribe to via the site.