WriteMentor Award: Young Adult winner interview

How did you feel when you found out you won the WriteMentor Novel Award ?

I was overwhelmed. I entered that place of disbelieve and kept rereading the email. I almost sent it to a friend so they can confirm I read it correctly. When there was no way left to argue, I decided WriteMentor has send me the wrong email. But when it finally landed, I felt a sense of achievement and with that I was humbled by the hard work that goes into writing a book.

How did you celebrate?

I took myself for a dark chocolate sorbetto, always in a cone. I sat outside the ice cream shop and smiled to myself thinking about the long way I have come in my writing journey. 

Tell us a bit about your writing journey to date.

I began writing very early. I have memories of journaling about my first book at the age of eight. Looking back, it was my way to make sense of the chaos all around. In my teens I wrote verse and poetry, but it wasn’t until I came to the UK in my early twenties that I began journaling and when I started working and a nanny, the children rekindled my love for stories and children’s literature.

Tell us more about the winning book, ‘Dancing on Fire‘.

Dancing on Fire is a book about belonging, about dancing around cultural beliefs and prejudices, desperately trying to fit in. This of course is a universal theme, but my character is both Bulgarian and English, and a teenager, which makes it that bit harder for her. 

What inspired the idea?

My goddaughters were bullied in primary school and when I asked them how their high school friends feel about them being Bulgarian, one of them had casually answered to me, “Well they don’t know, it never really comes up.” And of course, all the unpleasant things that happened to East Europeans during Brexit, they had edged in me and were waiting for a safe place to come out. 

So this book feels precious because despite the heavy themes it addresses, it is a one happy coincidence. I came to the MA at Bath spa university writing stories of magic and fairy tales. And it was in one short exercise that this story sprung up. At the time my verse was not something I have ever shared, it felt too raw, too close to my skin. I was a bit like my character. I used to dance between being Bulgarian or British, trying to fit into one or the other, until I realised that to belong, I need to be the whole of me.

What was the WriteMentor Award experience like for you, as an entrant?

I felt a sense of achievement just by submitting. I was truly pleased with myself for entering, for putting myself out there. And then the anticipation, the emails, it was all very exciting. And I must say, Stuart and the team make it all so easy for everyone. It has been a wonderful experience.

What advice would you give other writers when entering writing awards in the future?

Go for it. And keep writing. I was ten thousand words short of finishing my novel, but I still entered. When I was longlisted, I had four days to finish it, that was intense, but in hindsight, the deadline helped me finish the novel. 

Any general writing advice for writers of children’s fiction?

One thing that works for me is dancing. I let my body move spontaneously, that helps my imagination to release, and stories just come tumbling in. And reading of course, no better advice, to be a writer you must be an avid reader. 

What’s next for your writing? Any new projects on the horizon?

I am writing a middle grade magical realism, an eco-feminist retelling of the selkie myth. I lived on the Outer Hebrides in Scotland, some twenty years ago, I worked in a fish factory there, but that is another story.