How to Win a Novel Award
Authors and multi-competition winners Emily Randall-Jones and Melissa Welliver share their advice on how to make your novel entry stand out amongst the crowd in competitions.
You can find out more about WriteMentor’s Novel Awards here: https://write-mentor.com/awards/write…
Emily trained as an actor, spending years touring across the UK and Ireland with the set in a horse box. (She once died three times in the same show). Since then she’s appeared as a Georgian princess at Hampton Court Palace and worked for the National Trust at Cliveden Estate and Ham House, devising trails, events and exhibitions. When not writing or child wrangling, she can be found near the sea or eating brunch.
Emily writes haunting middle-grade mysteries, and her book The Witch Stone Ghosts won the Mslexia Childrens & YA Novel Competition and the Times/Chicken House Prize. It will be published by Chicken House in September 2023.
Melissa Welliver writes Young Adult Speculative novels. She has a BA Honours degree in English Literature and History from the University of Leeds and an MA in Creative Writing from Manchester University. She runs her own programming and application business, Mabel Apps, and in the past has written for several gaming magazines as a reviewer. After graduating from university, Melissa went on to be published in two short story anthologies, one with a forward by Jeanette Winterson. She has a self-published novel, The Undying Tower, published in 2021. Her debut, My Love Life and the Apocalypse, will be published by Chicken House in 2023.
Melissa has completed the acclaimed Curtis Brown Creative Novel Writing Course for children under the tutelage of Catherine Johnson. She has been longlisted for the Bath Novel Award, the #BNAKids award, and Mslexia’s Children’s Novel Prize, and she was shortlisted for both the inaugural Hachette Children’s Novel Award in association with New Writing North, and the Wells Book for Children competition. She lives in the Northwest with her Bassetoodle, Zelda, and is represented by Lucy Irvine of Peters, Fraser & Dunlop.