Previous Charles Pick Fellows

Will Boast was born in England (Southampton) and grew up in Ireland and Wisconsin. His story collection, Power Ballads, won the 2011 Iowa Short Fiction Award. His fiction and essays have appeared in Best New American Voices, Narrative, Salon, Glimmer Train, The American Scholar, and The New York Times, among other publications. From 2008-2010, he was a Stegner Fellow in fiction at Stanford University; he’s currently a Charles Pick Fellow at the University of East Anglia in the UK. He’s...

Helen Dinmore is a writer from Adelaide, South Australia. She graduated from the Creative Writing program at Flinders University in 2010 with First Class Honours and several academic and writing prizes, including the University Medal. She has worked as a publishing assistant and manuscript assessor, and her short fiction and poetry has appeared in a number of Australian literary journals. She is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Adelaide, where she is writing two...

Ret’sepile Makamane was born and raised in Lesotho. She read Philosophy and Theatre at the National University of Lesotho, and then moved to Johannesburg where she studied Drama and Film at the University of Witwatersrand. There she worked as an actress, waitress and reviewed books for a local newspaper before becoming a Commissioning Editor for SABC television (The South African Broadcasting Corporation). She came to England in 2008 on a Graça Machel Scholarship, and wrote her...

Jon Lewis-Katz has taught in the New York City public school system and at Cornell University, where he completed his MFA in Creative Writing. He has received the Charles Pick Fellowship at the University of East Anglia and the Alonzo Davis Fellowship at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. He has also completed residencies at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts and the Paden Institute and Retreat for Writer’s of Color. His fiction, essays, and journalism have appeared in publications...

Simi Awosika practiced as a journalist in Nigeria first in the African Guardian magazine and then TheNEWS magazine where she covered many journalistic genres. The experience gave her an insight into the intricacies of Nigerian life and continues to provide themes for her stories. Until recently, Simi worked at the Greater London Authority. She has published short stories, among them ‘Firefly Ring’ in Brand (June 2008). Another short story ‘He Won't Touch Her Now’ was short-listed for the...

Birgit Larsson is Swedish and Icelandic but has spent her life moving between Europe and the US. She has degrees in English literature from Harvard and the University of Edinburgh. She worked as an Assistant Editor at W.W. Norton before becoming a Community Outreach Coordinator, mediator, and Restorative Justice facilitator for a non-profit in Brooklyn, NY. She has also been an ESL teacher, an advocate for survivors of sexual assault, and a wedding officiant. The novel Birgit worked on...

Erin Soros was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, where she worked as a rape crisis counsellor and coordinator of literacy programs for marginalized youth. She has an MA from UBC, an MFA from Columbia University and has published poetry, fiction and nonfiction, most recently in West Coast Line, Indiana Review, Iowa Review and the in-flight magazine enRoute. Her stories have been aired on the CBC and BBC as recipients of the CBC Literary Award and the Commonwealth Prize for the...

David Sornig was born and raised in Melbourne, Australia. During the fellowship David worked on a novel that explores the cultural and moral landscape of global warming. His story ' Sunday Sunday ' emerges from this work. His debut novel Spiel was published by University of Western Australia Publishing in 2009. He holds a PhD in creative writing from Deakin University and lectures in creative writing at Flinders University in Adelaide. He is a fiction editor for Wet Ink Magazine ,...

Lois Williams was raised in Britain and now lives in Pittsburgh, where she teaches poetry and nonfiction at the University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She writes about landscape, family, and migration. As a Charles Pick Fellow she wrote memoir and researched stories of her extended family who settled in Lincolnshire, Norfolk, and London. From that work, her essay “The House of Provisions” was published in Granta, Issue 103, in October 2008. The essay was honoured with a Notable Essay...

Sam Fletcher studied English Literature at the University and graduated with First Class Honours in 2003. He gained a Diploma in Periodical Journalism at the London College of Communication in 2004, before enrolling on the MA Creative Writing Programme at the University, graduating in 2005. He was awarded the Charles Pick Fellowship and returned to UEA at the beginning of September 2005. He is working on his novel, Pieces of Salvage , set in postwar Orkney.

Brian Chikwava studied for a B.Sc (Hons) at the University of the West of England. In 2004 Brian won the Caine Prize for African Writing with his short story, Seventh Street Alchemy and the following year he was awarded a three-month Charles Pick Fellowship. In 2009 his first novel, Harare North was published in April 2009 by Jonathan Cape. The novel was published in French by Éditions Zoé in 2011. Brian is currently working on another novel. A memoir piece of his, The Fig Tree and...

"I’d like to thank everyone involved, for the wonderful opportunity of this fellowship. It has been a great experience in many ways and I hope I have made the most of it. Until I arrived last August, progress on my novel had been very intermittent, and having the time and space in which to generate some writing momentum has been invaluable. Over the six months I have managed to make substantial progress with the plot, distilling the various ideas I had into something (hopefully) much more...

"The Fellowship really helped me. I had been working in a restaurant and I found I could give up waiting on tables and concentrate exclusively on writing. Equally, it gave me confidence since I had been chosen by judges whose writing I respected. Living on campus, and being a part of UEA's English and American Studies department, provided a supportive environment. At the end of the six months I had completed the first part of the novel. I sent it to publishers and it was picked up by Hamish...

"The Charles Pick Fellowship provided the ideal environment and total freedom for me to grapple with the language and ideas of my first novel, The Iron Boys , a magical-realist monologue, with alchemical elements, taking place during the Luddite rebellions. A section from the book appeared in Agni Online (2006) and, in Italian translation, in Buran (2007), and the novel was published in November 2011, on the 200th anniversary of the first Luddite-style attack, by Burning Books. It was...