EMBA Author Panel

EMBA Author Panel at Festival of Words

Kathleen Bell, sitting in for John Lucas, began by explaining what the EMBA is. In case you didn’t know, it stands for East Midlands Book Award. Now in its third year, the EMBA is an independent, annual award, given to a writer of fiction, creative non-fiction or poetry, currently living in the East Midlands. It aims to promote the best literature coming out of the region and to reward exceptional work.

Joining Kathleen on the panel were two previous winners and a couple of shortlisted writers. In a kind of chronological order we meet Leicestershire’s Mark Goodwin, the first recipient of the award back in 2011. Mark read three poems, one of which was from Shod, the poetic adventure that was a surprise winner of that inaugural award. Active in the poetry scene for many years, Mark has worked in schools as well as for the mental health services and, as you’d expect, his delivery is polished. The poetry itself is vivid, clean and powerful. It has an element of controlled anger.

Paula Rawsthorne, shortlisted for the EMBA in 2012, was the next to read from her work. Her YA novel The Truth About Celia Frost, concerns a friendless, freaky kid who suffers from a disorder that leaves her in constant fear of bleeding to death. Paula’s reading leads up to a dramatic hook, with Celia about to come a cropper, before the book is closed. There was enough fear, tension and desperation in that sample chapter to grab the audience. A clever marketing ploy if ever there was one. A Liverpudlian, Paula now lives in Nottingham and praised the support of the Nottingham Writers’ Studio.

Shortlisted for his poetry book An Ordinary Dog, Nottingham’s Gregory Woods stood up and belted out three poems. It was a pleasure to hear the homophonic masterpiece I’d first heard at the festival’s launch night. Another gem previously aired that night at Antenna was Messages, an angry poem that seems to fit Greg’s attitude to love. ‘How I’d rejoice even to hear an insult in your voice.’ Acerbic and precise, the poems are passionately performed.

Winning the 2012 award was Anne Zoroudi, author of the Mysteries of the Greek Detective. The fifth book in her series (of seven), The Whispers of Nemesis, took the prize. The Derbyshire author’s story tells of desperate measures and long-kept secrets, of murder and immortality and of pride coming before the steepest of falls. Anne sees her books as morality tales and picks ‘metaphysical crime’ as her genre. This is no typical procedural detective story, partly due to the detective Hermes Diaktoros, and partly because of the book’s otherworldliness. The author might live in the Peak District but her heart is in the Greek islands and the country’s mythology seems to provide much of her inspiration.

The panelists ended with a brief Q and A, expressing a varied response to the density and profile of the region’s literary scene at which, as expected, Nottingham fared better than north Derbyshire. Another difference of note was in how the novelists and poets saw themselves. Somehow the EMBA have to compare the two’s technical merits.  

The shortlist for this year’s EMBA will be announced at ‘States of Independence’ a free event celebrating indie publishing at De Montforth University on Sat March 16^th.

The winners will be announced in June.