Exeter Writers

Meet the Winners! The winner of this year's 1st prize was Abigail Williams with her story, Dancing the Dead Leaf Charleston . Abigail lives in Totnes in Devon with her husband, three children and one wayward dog. She spent twenty years working for a Yorkshire-based creative agency and is now, between juggling family and part-time copywriting work, in the process of completing her first novel. We were dead keen to ask her a few questions... How did you feel when you found out that you'd won? Elated! And then concerned that there might have been a mistake... and then grateful. Writing is such a fickle, subjective business. Sometimes judges and readers see value in stories that we aren't sure of, and sometimes we have a story that we believe in and no one else does and it's impossible to understand why. For every prize that anyone wins, there will have been dozens of rejections or close calls, so to all the other listees and to everyone who entered the competition with a s...

 Dancing the Dead Leaf Charleston  by  Abigail Williams   Agnes had never liked this time of year. All the leaves falling, the skittish wind. They had meant to repaper his room, get rid of all the model aeroplanes he had spent so many hours glueing and painting, but then there had been the news about Freya and their engagement and there hadn't seemed much point. She had known even then that he would never come home to live. He would have joined the firm as a clerk, she supposed, worked his way up. The war put paid to university of course.               A branch scratched the window. Every fresh gust pushed it this way, then pulled it back. It was like fingernails, someone trying to get in.             She liked to pretend that he had died in spring. That he succumbed to injuries in a walled garden surrounded by English nurses in crisp white aprons, the s...