You are viewing your 1 free article this month. Login to read more articles.
Kate Carne and Angela Cheveau win QuietManDave Prize 2024
The winners of the 2024 QuietManDave Prize have been named as Kate Carne and Angela Cheveau. The short-form writing competition run by Manchester Met’s Manchester Writing School and Manchester School of Theatre, honours Manchester critic Dave Murray.
Carne took home the top prize for the flash fiction category with her story Conversing with the Comma and Cheveau received the award for the non-fiction category with To the Grasshopper in Bottom Right of Van Gogh’s Olive Orchard, 1889.
The winners were revealed at an awards ceremony hosted at Manchester Met’s Manchester Poetry Library on 13th December where both Carne and Cheveau were awarded £1,000 prize money.
Carne is also the author of Seven Secrets of Mindfulness: How to Keep Your Everyday Practice Alive (Rider, 2016), and her short stories have won the Wasafiri Prize, the Hammond House Award, and the Bath Flash Fiction Ad Hoc Prize. She has also been shortlisted for the Bridport Prize, the Alpine Fellowship, the Comma Press Dinesh Allirajah Award and was a finalist in the Cinnamon Press Literature Award.
Carne said: “Like QuietManDave, I embraced the act of writing relatively late in life. Perhaps an increasing awareness of mortality stimulates human creativity, or maybe I just realised that writing is more fun than going out to work. I feel grateful to have the space and the unruliness to put words on the page, and it’s a bonus when other people – like all of you – receive those words.
Continues…
Read More
“Conversing with the Comma arose one morning in the garden, when I was watching a raggedly-edged orange butterfly dancing through the air. It settled and revealed a perfect comma on the brown underneath of its wings. That was three years ago. Unfortunately, this flash fiction turned out to be a kind of omen, because not a single comma butterfly has appeared here since. Next summer, if you happen to see one of these butterflies, immerse yourself [in] its summery orange, its scalloped wings and, of course, that precious punctuation mark.”
Cheveau is currently studying for an MA in Creative Writing at Manchester Met and is a full-time carer. She has published in poetry anthologies with Writing on the Wall and Written Off Publishing.
She was shortlisted for The Bridport Prize for Poetry and the Plough Poetry Prize in 2014, the Nine Arches Press Primers competition in 2023 and received an honourable mention in the Dark Poets Prize 2024. She was also a finalist in Writing on the Wall’s 2023 Pulp Idol fiction competition, and Liverpool’s National Museums and Galleries Flash Fiction competition.
Cheveau said: "What a complete honour to have been involved in this competition and to have been shortlisted for the non-fiction flash category. As a poet, flash fiction is something I am naturally drawn to both for its brevity and its ability to articulate profound thoughts or emotions in a compressed way. I am thrilled to be alongside such talented writers and to be a small part of such an esteemed competition.
Continues…
"As a student of Manchester Met, this is even more special to me. I wanted to write this piece in order to commemorate my friend Rachel who took her own life. This is my way of showing the world that she was important, her story was important, all of our stories are. I am incredibly grateful to be involved at all, and the organisers and staff involved have been nothing short of wonderful and supportive. The whole competition has been a joy to have been a part of."
Second place in the Flash Fiction category was awarded to Jay McKenzie with Florence Nightingale is Late for Her Eyebrow Threading Appointment while Kerry Andrew took home third place with Back Home.
Taking second place in the Flash Non-Fiction category is Heather D Haigh with When I Say You Look Tired, I Mean You’re Going to Die, and Steve Ashton was awarded third place with Bringing Up The Bodies.
The QuietManDave Prize runs every two years and this year’s prize received more than 900 entries.
Co-chair of the judges Catherine Love, lecturer in theatre at the University of York said: "I was so impressed by the quality and experimentation that we saw across the entries to this year’s Prize. I have loved being surprised by what writers are able to do within the constraints of a tight word count and I’m excited about the wide-ranging selection of pieces that have made it to the final shortlist."
