Laura Stanley
We are delighted to hear of former student Laura Stanley's success in winning the short story Staunch Book Prize with her piece Mrs Hawkins and the Orchard.
The prize is for thrillers that ‘offer an alternative narrative to stories based around violence to women’. Laura's story is about a middle-aged Victorian lady accused of stealing from a department store. Her lawyer uses the popular contemporary defence of kleptomania - claiming she’s suffering some sort of menopausal madness - but Mrs Hawkins isn’t as frail and ill as she first seems.
Laura graduated in English with Creative Writing from the University of Nottingham, and is now studying for a Master’s at the University of Birmingham.
You can read more of Laura's work this summer, as she is due to be published in issue 80 of Magma, entitled 'Avatars'.
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