Meet our latest HW Fisher Scholar
BY Katie Smart
25th Oct 2019
We’re pleased to announce that Ciara Aaron has been awarded the HW Fisher Scholarship for her novel-in-progress Birdbath. Ciara has won a fully-funded place on our three-month novel-writing course taught by Charlotte Mendelson in London. Ciara is the eighth talented writer of limited financial means to be offered a scholarship on one of our selective entry creative writing courses by HW Fisher & Company Chartered Accountants.
At CBC we were instantly struck by Ciara's raw talent and mesmerising narrative voice. We’re thrilled that she will be joining our autumn three-month novel-writing course next month.
Her novel-in-progress Birdbath is about a young girl coming to terms with the shocking death of her mother. Heavily influenced by myth and magical realism, it is a coming-of-age story which powerfully explores loss and grief.
Ciara said: 'Winning the scholarship for my first work-in-progress is an astonishing achievement. I’m extremely grateful for the opportunity and I expect it to have a very meaningful impact.'
The CBC team would like to thank HW Fisher for their ongoing support of our courses through this scholarship programme, which has been running since autumn 2015. The HW Fisher sponsorship of CBC started when Andrew Subramanium, a partner in HW Fisher’s media group, working with an impressive list of writers, musicians and artists, got talking to CBC’s director Anna Davis. That first conversation, over three years ago, quickly led to the development of a scholarship programme that has funded two students per year ever since.
Here at CBC we are dedicated to finding talented writers and helping them get the best out of their novels. It’s very important for us to support writers through scholarship opportunities who would not otherwise have been able to take our courses, and we are absolutely delighted that two of our previous HW Fisher scholars have already gone on to get book deals. Our spring 2018 scholar Kiare Ladner had her debut novel Nightshift snapped up by Picador while she was studying with us. And our scholar of 2016, Louise McCreesh, now has a deal with Hodder & Stoughton for Cracked, the novel she was writing on the course.
Keep an eye on our scholarship page to find out when our next scholarship will open for applications.
We also run six-week online courses designed to help writers at different stages of their novel-writing journey: Starting to Write Your Novel, Write to the End of Your Novel and Edit & Pitch Your Novel.