Canelo / Arts Council England

Canelo / Arts Council England | 
47

Literature in the 21st Century: Understanding Models of Support for Literary Fiction
want to pursue the arts. Writer residencies and retreats are also an 
option. Cove Park, for instance, offers year round residences on 50 
acres of Scotland’s West Coast. With a new £1.4m Artist Centre it’s 
increasingly influential. Or there is Ardtornish Retreat or the Writer in 
Residence programme at the Gladstone Library or the British Library’s 
Eccles Centre. Prizes like the Deborah Rogers Foundation Writers 
Award will be a huge help. Founded in memory of the legendary 
literary agent, the award gives £10,000 to a promising new writer. As 
mentioned above, universities are becoming more important – they not 
only offer teaching opportunities but there is scope for research grants 
and writer in residence posts. 
For the committed there are sources of not-for-profit support. Much of 
it is regional and institution specific and hence only available to those 
on the ground. Still, it’s there, though all of it needs to be applied for. If 
we compare the sheer number of writers being produced against the 
small stock of support out there, we can see it’s a serious mismatch. 
The demand massively outstrips supply. The inaugural Deborah Rogers 
Writers Award, for example, had 850 entries for the one prize. For most 
writers, this support won’t be possible. For those that do get it though, 
it will be invaluable. 
One further point is worth making. Several of our author interviewees 
pointed out the lack of a central hub where writers can support and 
mentor one another. This support may be non-financial, but it could 
still be a huge help – in finding grants and other means of support, 
navigating the often complex and sometimes cut throat industry or 
offering advice on writing. Kit de Waal, who has herself created a 
scholarship open to those in her former creative writing course, thought 
this could be enormously important to writers: 
Writers are often happy to mentor others or spend some time on the 
phone with writers who don’t ‘win’. Other writers are willing to help 
people get on the ladder. That community of published or successful 
writers need to find a way of helping. It’s not about a scholarship 
necessarily, but finding ways of supporting. They want to help, but 
how? There is no central hub for writers to put in say five hours of 
mentoring, and then another writer asks for help on. If there was a 
central exchange for writers it would go a long way. I’ve got more 
offers of help than I know what to do with. It’s the mechanism that’s 
lacking. It would be fabulous. We need to find a way to harness 
people’s good hearts and expertise and then get the message out to 
new writers coming up. It could just an hour of time – it’s nothing to a 
writer or agent but it’s everything to a new writer.
 

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