Canelo / Arts Council England

Canelo / Arts Council England | 

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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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