Eden-based writer Katie Hale has won the prestigious ALCS Tom Gallon Trust Award, for a short story set in the Lake District.
Based near Shap, Katie is a novelist and poet who runs young poets’ workshops for Wordsworth Grasmere and mentors emerging writers through the Writing Squad.
She is a MacDowell Fellow and winner of multiple literary awards.
Katie’s winning story, Raise, or How To Break Free of the Ground, or The Lakeland Dialect for Slippery is Slape and to Form It in the Mouth Requires an Act of Falling, was written when Katie was poet in residence at Wordsworth Grasmere in 2019, and follows the route of her daily walk up the hill at the back of Dove Cottage.
Judge Peter Hobbs said: “Raise is a beautiful, elliptical gem of a story, its tension created and held perfectly by every sentence. It’s rooted in life and vivid landscape, but offers a meditation on how and why we tell stories. It was an easy winner — the outstanding story this year and the unanimous choice of all the judges.”
Katie said: “Writing can be such a long and lonely game at times, so it’s wonderful to receive that external confirmation that you’re doing something right. It’s what keeps you going in the darker times, when the words just won’t come and the plot holes just won’t smooth.
“It also means a lot to be shortlisted with a story which is not only set in Cumbria, but which makes use of Lakeland dialect. In an industry still largely centred around London, it’s important to tell northern stories and to give space for the rural in an increasingly urbanised world.”
Katie’s most recent novel, The Edge of Solitude, comes out in paperback on July 3 and can be pre-ordered from all local bookshops and online.
