Commonword is excited to announce a competition to find 12 women writers of Muslim and Jewish background to take part in a new anthology:

WHEN SAIRA MET SARAH

This anthology is intended to be both a celebration of new writing and those things Muslims and Jews have in common – it’s a co-existence project between the pages of a book.

We are looking for twelve women from the north-west of England who are over 18 and have not yet had their work published, or do not have a significant publishing history.

The winners will be mentored by Sherry Ashworth (Jewish) and Anjum Malik (Muslim.)  Sherry is a successful novelist and publisher; Anjum is a critically acclaimed poet and playwright.  They will help the chosen writers to produce new pieces of work for the anthology, either prose or verse.

Mentoring will take place both face to face and by email.

The selected writing will be published in 2014.

If you want to be considered for this project, please send a sample of your creative writing by e-mail to:

wsms@cultureword.org.uk

The sample should be either up to 40 lines of verse or 1,500 words of prose – perhaps an extract from a story or novel, but not journalism.  Please include a covering letter telling us a little about yourself.

saira-sarah flyer low resThe closing date for entries is 30th April 2013.