Meet Rachel Driscoll, our Write From Home Scholar
BY Katie Smart
15th Jul 2020
We’re pleased to announce that Rachel Driscoll has been awarded the Write From Home Scholarship for her novel-in-progress His Name is Oskar. Rachel has won a fully-funded place on our Three-Month Online Novel-Writing course taught by Andrew Michael Hurley.
At CBC we were captivated by Rachel's unique narrator – Darkness itself. We’re thrilled to have her on board for our current online course and couldn't wait to find out more about this fascinating novel ...
Please could you tell us a bit about yourself and your novel-in-progress His Name is Oskar?
History has always been a passion of mine, and I’ve always been intrigued by unique voices in novels. When I first came up with the idea for His Name is Oskar I decided to confront my personal fear of the dark with my interest in original narrators - and I came up with Darkness, personified as an ethereal guardian. His Name is Oskar is the story of three children and their unique relationships with Darkness and a teddy bear called Oskar during the maelstrom of WW2 in Poland.
What does winning this scholarship place mean to you?
I was fortunate enough to be a part of one of the Edit and Pitch Your Novel courses last year – which I highly recommend. Since then I have wanted nothing more than to do one of the longer CBC courses, as I believe in my novel but also want the guidance to fully shape it that I know I will get from the three-month course. I feel honoured to have won the scholarship and to have this opportunity, and I’m excited to learn from the course tutor, visiting tutors and agents and to see where this takes me and Oskar.
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 who would not otherwise have been able to take our courses by offering scholarship opportunities, and we are absolutely delighted that five of our previous scholarship winners have already gone on to get book deals.
If you're interested in funded opportunities with us, watch this space. An announcement will be made in the next few weeks concerning further writing opportunities with Curtis Brown Creative to happen this autumn.
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.