Anna Vaught seeks support for Curae Prize and festival

Author Anna Vaught is seeking funding to run the Curae Prize for a second year and launch a new literary festival in 2026. 

Vaught established the Curae Prize in 2022 for writers who are carers, it received strong industry support and over 300 people submitted entries. The two winners – Kate Blincoe and Helen O’Neill – received a bursary while the whole shortlist has since achieved publication. 

In January 2025, Vaught plans to launch the prize again and is seeking industry support through bursaries, mentoring, book tokens, online courses or sponsorship. The relaunched prize will include an additional poetry category. Again, the winners’ work will be published in an anthology by the award-winning Renard Press. Last year’s anthology has already raised several hundred pounds for carers’ charities.  

In addition to plans for the 2025, Vaught hopes to launch a new literary festival in 2026. The PhD student said she “will be seeking funding and business partnership for this, a modest – initially – literary festival with a focus on books, writing and wellbeing”. The festival will have in-person and online components with the physical festival held on the Wiltshire-Somerset border.  

All events will be small-scale and in partnership with a local bookshop, while a one-day writing retreat will be offered at “Vaught’s very own cave of books and Welshcakes, her home known to the trade as ’Bookworm Towers’". There will also be a dedicated event for writer-carers, as an overlap with the Curae Prize. 

Vaught is a writer, teacher, mentor, and Bookseller columnist. She was a teenage carer and then became a carer again in the last few years while also experiencing a chronic illness herself. She established the Curae Prize partly to show “that writing, and artistic pursuit and endeavour more broadly, are not a luxury, but core – particularly with regard to identity and wellbeing”. 

Contact thecuraeprize@gmail.com for more information.