Submissions Call Now Closed!

The submission call is now closed!

Many thanks to all the publishers that submitted titles for the cycle. The titles are being collated and distributed to the panel.

The panel meeting is 19 February, when the ten titles will be chosen as the new selection for Exclusively Independent.

Check back here on the 19th, to see the new list!

Lauren

Ghosts of Eden Launch

Featured just before Christmas last year, was the fantastic The Ghosts of Eden by Andrew Sharp (Picnic Publishing).

This is a superb epic about love, medicine and cultural identities with a huge African and European cast which concludes on the shores of the Indian ocean. Michael Lacey, the child of missionaries, and Zachye Katura, tending cattle for his father in the grasslands of Kaaro Karungi, are happy in their childhood idyll. However, the world around them is changing, propelling them towards tragedy. Haunted by grief and guilt, they grow up severed from their families and ancestral heritage. When they both fall for the same enigmatic woman they must face their past and hear their ancestors if they are to make their way in the modern world. This is a cross-cultural, cross-racial love story with a spectacular East African setting and contemporary worldwide themes of the effects of rapid cultural change.

Click on the image below to view some pictures from the launch in Zimbabwe.

The launch in Zimbabwe of Dr Andrew Sharp's fabulous THE GHOSTS OF EDEN

Many thanks to Corinne for supplying the images.

Lauren

Nick Griffiths - In the Footsteps of Harrison Dextrose

Here on the Exclusively Independent blog, we are hoping to make the site more interactive. While we are extremely grateful to each of the authors/publishers who have written blogs, we wanted to provide a bit more of an insight, into the book as a whole.

To kick off, below is some video footage for In the Footsteps of Harrison Dextrose by Nick Griffiths (Legend Press).

Stephanie Tillotson, Editor of Cut on the Bias

Chosen as one of the new EI titles, is Cut on the Bias (Honno Press). This is a delightful selection is: a Haute Couture collection designed to reflect the complex relationships between women and the clothes they stand up in. Stephanie Tillotson, Editor of Cut on the Bias, has graciously provided us with a blog detailing a 'behind the scenes' snapshot into the formation of such a unique collection.

Personally, I’m not what you would call a ‘dedicated follower of fashion’. I can’t remember the last time I bought ‘Vogue’ or ‘Cosmo’ and I’ve never seen Gok Wan on anything other than a poster outside one of our more famous high street chains. My idea of image was changing the buttons on a charity shop garment or routing about in my mother’s left over balls of wool. I wasn’t one of those who were ‘born to shop’ and, to be honest with you, now I can only just remember why I suggested we take fashion and image as the theme for an forthcoming anthology of fictional short stories – but I’m glad I did.

When the call for submissions was put out for writers to send in their stories for inclusion in a collection called ‘Cut on the Bias’, it was 2007 and the economy was still booming. Cash registers and credit cards were groaning across the length and breadth of the country. Then, as now, celebrity had become the new heaven, the place where existence was perfect - and the entrance key was image. It was like Alice in Wonderland: buy this and you could be bigger, eat this and you could be smaller, drink this and you could be younger, sexier, more popular. Yes, right; in an adman’s bank balance! And although it was madness, people were having fun!

Dressing up is fun; make-believe is fun! It’s something to do with hats and wigs and shoes and handbags, yes and changing the buttons to get it just right. There is a childish delight in disguise what many of us share and I suspect that is why I was interested in stories about women and the clothes they wear. Not only does ‘Cut on the Bias’ show the work of writers trying to make sense of the shapelessness of human experience but it features authors, each one of whom has understood that the question “What shall I wear today?” is really, “Who shall I be today?”.

So, taking image as the central metaphor for transformation, all the stories included weave colourful pictures full of humour and joy, love and friendship, illness and grief, of unfulfilled lives and ugly ducklings that discover their own way of becoming beautiful swans. One story asks what you wear to meet the mother who gave you up at birth; another tells of the death of a long dead, beloved brother; a third describes the wardrobe full of armour that a modern politician must learn to wear. There are, of course, stories that explore our very human fascination with celebrity and the worlds of fashion, marketing and advertising. Others are rites of passage – a wayside bomb in Afghanistan rips a soldier’s life apart; a young woman with Down’s syndrome decides to face the future with confidence and someone is even prepared to gamble all for that pair of ruby slippers.

Yes, well, maybe I do remember why I thought editing an anthology of short stories about fashion and image would be a good idea. Maybe I lied earlier – because, of course, if naked is the truth then clothes are lies, fictions that touch us closely, intimately, making contact with our most sensitive parts: clothes, as we know, are sexy too. So after all the reading of submissions; selecting of stories for the collection; conversations via email and phones; the editing and re-editing; the copy-editing, proof-reading and printing, enter the super-model of the season – ‘Cut on the Bias’. After all, when everything is said and done and gone, nothing survives but the stories we tell.

Stephanie

Anna Chilvers' Blog

Selected last week, one of the new titles for Exclusively Independent is Falling Through Clouds (Bluemoose Books).

There have been a number of moments in my life when I have decided to be a writer.

The first was probably when I was about seven years old and decided to be famous for being the youngest person ever to have a novel published. I started on chapter one – many, many times. I wrote Chapter Ones of books influenced by Beatrix Potter (little pigs go off on an adventure with their belongings tied up in a handkerchief on a stick), C.S.Lewis (children find themselves transported to a wonderful magical world full of green mosses, bluebells and magical pools) and the Pullein-Thompsons (girl makes friends with a horse) and many more.

Time went on, and school pushed me to make career choices, and writer didn’t seem to be one of options on offer. So I went for Educational Psychologist instead and chose all the right ‘O’ levels and ‘A’ levels and got into UCL to do a BSc in Psychology. All went well until one day somewhere in the third term, when I thought, hang on, stuff this, I wanted to be a writer. So I left university and got a job in a bookshop. I also walked about on Hampstead Heath a lot, visited Highgate Cemetery and wrote a lot of poems. I started a novel, but my particularly crap boyfriend didn’t like me giving extended attention to something other than him and burned it.

A few jobs, an English degree, a husband (who is completely lovely still after 20 years) and two children later, I thought, hang on, I wanted to be a writer. The girls were small and I was at home and I thought, now or never. So I joined a class and went on a course and started writing. Pamela Johnson, a wonderful writing teacher from Goldsmith College, asked me how long I thought it would take me to write a novel and I said about two years. She said, write it in one. So I went home and wrote a novel in eight months.

I wrote Falling Through Clouds whist completing an MA at Sheffield Hallam University. The reasons I am still writing are these - one – it’s what I’ve always really wanted to do - each of those moments was an epiphany. And secondly, the encouragement, support and downright nagging of people who believe in me.

Anna