This episode is a Writing Life special, featuring an hour of new writing read by the writers on this year’s National Centre for Writing Escalator programme - recorded earlier this year at the showcase event, here at Dragon Hall.  

• Melody Bowles

Escalator is our talent development programme. And each year, we look for ambitious, challenging, unconventional and affecting new voices in fiction writing from the East of England. The region is made up of a diverse society of people, and supporting writers who are under-represented on UK bookshelves has become a core objective of the project. 

The programme has been running since 2004 and includes eight months of mentoring, training, guidance and networking for participants. To date we’ve supported more than 130 writers, many of whom have gone on to sign with agents, publish and win awards and critical recognition for their novels and short stories.

We had a fantastic group of writers in 2022 and we hosted them here for the annual Escalator Showcase event where they all read from their work. This is the audio from that event.

https://nationalcentreforwriting.org.uk/escalator/