New Room 204 fiction for 2022: Ania Bas, Liz Hyder, Elizabeth Lee and Susan Stokes-Chapman
Long-form fiction is rightly considered one of the most demanding of literary forms. Faced with the challenge of creating a world that is both convincing and engaging, novelists devote thousands of hours in the pursuit of completion. Four novelists who are part of Writing West Midlands’ prestigious Room 204 Writer Development Programme discuss the challenges they faced and overcame in completing their novels.
Chaired by Jonathan Davidson
About the speakers:
Ania Bas is an artist, writer and arts organiser. Her work has been commissioned by the Tate, Whitechapel Gallery, Art on the Underground, Yorkshire Artspace. Ania is a co-founder of The Walking Reading Group (2013 – ongoing). She is Open School East Alumna (2013- 2014) and Faber Academy Alumna (2018). She currently works at Eastside Projects as Artist Organiser, she joined Writing West Midlands Room 204 in 2020. Her debut novel is Odd Hours.
Liz Hyder has been making up stories for as long she can remember. She has a BA in drama from the University of Bristol and, in early 2018, won the Bridge Award/ Moniack Mhor Emerging Writer Award. Bearmouth, her debut young adult novel, won a Waterstones Children’s Book Prize, the Branford Boase Award and was chosen as the Children’s Book of the Year by The Times. Originally from London, she now lives in South Shropshire. The Gifts is her debut adult novel.
Elizabeth Lee won the Curtis Brown Creative Marian Keyes Scholarship, and her work has been selected for the Womentoring Project and Penguin’s WriteNow Live. She lives in Warwickshire.
Susan Stokes-Chapman grew up in the historic Georgian city of Lichfield, Staffordshire. She studied for four years at Aberystwyth University, graduating with a BA in Education & English Literature and an MA in Creative Writing. Her debut novel, Pandora, was shortlisted for the Lucy Cavendish Fiction prize 2020 as well as longlisted for the Bath Novel Award that same year, and became and instant Sunday Times No1 bestseller when it was published in January 2022.
