Your Novel: How to Get Started Webinar
Get advice on how to write a great opening that will hook the judges and start preparing your submission to Discoveries 2024.
Join our free webinar Your Novel: How to Get Started webinar on Thurs 26 Oct 2023, 7.00pm to 8.30pm (UK time), it will feature expert speakers including Discoveries 2024 judges Kate Mosse, Rowan Hisayo Buchanan and Anna Davis – plus Curtis Brown agent Ciara Finan and her client Paige Cowan-Hall (winner of Discoveries 2023).
The webinar will be open to 500 people and will be available to watch on the CBC YouTube channel after the event. Event attendees will also have the chance to submit a question to the expert panel.
Registration for this event is now open. Click the button below to sign up.
Speakers
Insights from our expert panel on writing and finding creative inspiration. More speakers to be announced.
Rowan Hisayo Buchanan
Rowan Hisayo Buchanan is the author of Harmless Like You, Starling Days, and The Sleep Watcher. Rowan is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She has won The Authors’ Club First Novel Award and a Betty Trask Award and has been shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award. Her short work has appeared in several places including Granta, Guernica, The Guardian, The Harvard Review, and NPR’s Selected Shorts. She is the editor of the Go Home! and Dog Hearted anthologies.
Anna Davis
Anna Davis is the founder and Director of the Curtis Brown Creative writing school. She is the author of five acclaimed novels which have been published in twenty languages. She has been a journalist and Guardian columnist, as well as a Curtis Brown literary agent. She taught creative writing at the University of Manchester and in many other settings before founding Curtis Brown Creative in 2011.
Paige Cowan-Hall
Paige Cowan-Hall grew up in Buckinghamshire and London before studying English Literature at Exeter University. She now lives in London and is pursuing a career in writing. She won the 2023 Discoveries Prize, the 2021 Desperate Literature Award, was a 2021 Spread the Word Awardee and has had her scripts shortlisted by the British Film Institute and Playground Theatre.
Paige's thirst for story telling started long before she attended university, when as a child her older brother would tell her stories about witches, and pantheons of ancient Greek gods and Egyptians, engendering a love for the mythical and fantastical that would later inspire her writing.
Paige wrote her first novel by hand at sixteen and is currently working on Marooned - a historical fantasy that explores race, gender and Obeah and is set in 18th century Jamaica, her family's country of origin. Marooned will be her debut novel.
Ciara Finan
Ciara Finan joined Curtis Brown in 2018. She is now an associate agent, and is looking for SFF, YA, psychological thrillers, historical novels, female-led commercial and book club fiction. She represents Paige Cowan-Hall, winner of the 2023 Discoveries Prize. She also works with literary agent Jonny Geller and his stellar list of clients.
Kate Mosse
Kate Mosse is the author of 10 novels and short story collections. Her books have sold more than 8 million copies worldwide and her fiction – which has been translated into 38 languages and published in more than 40 countries – includes the No 1 international bestselling Languedoc Trilogy (Labyrinth, Sepulchre and Citadel), the No 1 bestselling The Joubert Family Chronicles (The Burning Chambers, The City of Tears and The Ghost Ship), and bestselling Gothic fiction including The Taxidermist’s Daughter and The Winter Ghosts. She has also written four works of non-fiction including the critically acclaimed memoir An Extra Pair of Hands, four plays, contributed essays and introductions to classic novels and collections. Her latest feminist history Warrior Queens & Quiet Revolutionaries: How Women (Also) Built the World was published last Autumn. A champion of women’s creativity, Kate is the Founder Director of the Women’s Prize for Fiction – founded in 1997 to honour, amplify and celebrate fiction written by women from all over the world – and chairs the Discoveries programme. Kate also sits on the Executive Committee of Women of the World, is the Founder of the global Woman in History campaign and is the Patron of several national and local arts organisations.
About Discoveries
Discoveries is a unique writing development initiative, which invites all unpublished women writers aged 18 and up, currently residing in the UK or Ireland and writing in English, to submit their works of adult fiction to the Discoveries Prize. The prize doesn’t require writers to have finished a novel – only to have started one – and it is free to enter. We're looking for writing that shows real potential, not necessarily polished drafts.
The programme includes free online and events that will run throughout the submissions window to inspire women to start writing a novel – this includes our free Your Novel: How to Get Started webinar.
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