The 2023 winners of the Emirates LitFest Writing Prize, the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature\u2019s prestigious competition to discover unpublished novelists, have been announced.<\/p>\n
This year the process was divided in two categories, adult fiction, and children\u2019s fiction. The prize for adult fiction was judged by Luigi Bonomi, leading literary agent and founder of LBA Books. The new category of children\u2019s fiction was judged by Louise Lamont, also a literary agent and director of LBA Books specialising in children\u2019s authors and illustrators.<\/p>\n
The winners are:<\/p>\n
Adult novel:<\/p>\n
1st<\/sup> place: Yi-Hwa Hanna<\/p>\n 2nd<\/sup> place: Noor Salih<\/p>\n 3rd<\/sup> place: Laura Mulligan Plunkett<\/p>\n 4th<\/sup> place: Andrea Gissdal<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Children\u2019s category:<\/p>\n 1st<\/sup> place: Romita Maitra<\/p>\n 2nd<\/sup> place: Mary Collins<\/p>\n \u201cFor the first time we have opened up the LitFest Writing Prize to include children\u2019s writers, in addition to writers of adult fiction, giving more entries the opportunity to be recognised,\u201d said AhlamBolooki<\/strong>, Festival Director of the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature. \u201cChildren\u2019s publishing goes from strength to strength, so we wanted to recognise this important category. The track record for putting new authors on the path to international publishing success has been tremendous, reflecting the huge number of talented writers in the region. I hope that this year\u2019s winning children\u2019s writers will enjoy similar success.\u201d<\/p>\n Both first-place winners will get a one-hour one-to-one session with the judge of their category for feedback and writing career advice.<\/p>\n Yi-Hwa Hanna<\/strong>\u2019s novel, The Casting Season<\/em> tells of a secret community that lives deep in the mountains of Truko Gorge, where a dragon\u2019s curse means that Shu-Ching will never be older than 30\u2026 and she has turned 16 years old for the 15th<\/sup> time. Can she discover a way to break the curse?<\/p>\n Romita Maitra<\/strong>\u2019s children\u2019s book, The Theft of the Grande Dame Ruby<\/em> tells the story of eleven-year-old Althea Bhowmick who is sent to visit her great-aunt Zenky and meets a robot bird named Gaspard and a scientist called R\u00e9o\u2026 and together they embark on a wild journey to track down the missing Grande Dame Ruby, a stolen gem.<\/p>\n Recognised as one of the most successful writing competitions in the region, the competition has a proven track record in finding new writing talent, producing nine published authors in the ten years since it began, although a publishing deal for the winner is not guaranteed.<\/p>\n Novelists that have never been published are eligible to enter, providing that they are 21 years or older and resident in the UAE,<\/strong> Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman or Saudi Arabia.\u00a0 Entrants had to submit a 400-word synopsis of the book in English and the first 2,000 words of their almost completed manuscript.<\/p>\n More information about the Emirates Literature Foundation can be found online<\/a> and year-round news of #EmiratesLitFest on\u00a0 LinkedIn<\/a>, Facebook<\/a>, Twitter<\/a>, Instagram<\/a>YouTube<\/a> and TikTok @emirateslitfest<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The 2023 winners of the Emirates LitFest Writing Prize, the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature\u2019s prestigious competition to discover unpublished novelists, have been announced. This year the process was divided in two categories, adult fiction, and children\u2019s fiction. The prize for adult fiction was judged by Luigi Bonomi, leading literary agent and founder of LBA […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":53512,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-53511","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.dubaicityguide.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53511","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.dubaicityguide.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.dubaicityguide.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.dubaicityguide.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.dubaicityguide.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=53511"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.dubaicityguide.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53511\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":53513,"href":"https:\/\/blog.dubaicityguide.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53511\/revisions\/53513"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.dubaicityguide.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/53512"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.dubaicityguide.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=53511"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.dubaicityguide.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=53511"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.dubaicityguide.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=53511"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}