“And honoured – the shortlist was just full of amazing books. The author said she was “really, really thrilled” to win. Previous winner Lisa McInerney, who was one of this year’s judges, said that Blakemore “takes limited historical detail and, with what seems like effortless grace and imagination, crafts a breathing, complex world full of wrenchingly human characters, and tells us their stories in language that bears endless rereading, so clever and unexpected and pleasurable it is”. The Manningtree Witches beat shortlisted novels including little scratch by Rebecca Watson and The Liar’s Dictionary by Eley Williams to take the £10,000 award, which is run by the National Centre for Writing. And something about having a story from history that already had a beginning, middle and end, was quite liberating in that sense.” But coming at it from poetry, I had a decent sense in writing of aesthetics and a cinematic, graphic way of composing scenes in my mind. “I didn’t really have the intention of writing and completing a novel, it started as play. In The Manningtree Witches, Blakemore captures the shame of poverty and social neglect unforgettably, and the alluring threat of women left alone together, in a novel which vividly immerses the reader in the world of those who history has tried to render mute.' -Megan Nolan, author of Acts of Desperation. I was messing around with prose, just to have something to write, and the story just really sort of jumped out at me,” Blakemore said. The process of the writing began when I was in a fallow period of writing poetry. “My dad lives in Manningtree so it was an area I knew quite well.
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