Brilliant Opportunity for Disabled Writers at the Start of their Writing Career

Curtis Brown Creative is offering a free nine-month mentoring programme to four aspiring disabled authors. You can be at any stage of your writing career from just starting to having completed a full unpublished manuscript.

Why You Should

The writing school is attached to the literary agency whose past and present clients include John le Carré, Margaret Atwood, Jilly Cooper, Ian Fleming, David Nicholls and Marian Keyes (+ hundreds more). Over 240 of the school’s students have gained deals with major publishers and some have gone onto to write international bestsellers and win literary prizes

Do You Qualify

Applicants must be over the age of 18 and have a disability, as defined by the Equality Act 2010. You’re disabled under the Equality Act 2010 if you have a physical or mental impairment that has a ‘substantial’ and ‘long-term’ negative effect on your ability to do normal daily activities.

You also have to be writing one of the following. It’s a broad scope so hopefully one of the categories covers what you are already doing or want to do.

• Novel written for adults
• Novel written for children (older than 7) or young adults
• Collection of short stories
• Memoir
• Narrative non-fiction

Apply Now

The timetable is tight: dead line for applications is November 3rd 2024 and the programme starts a week later.

Winners will get one-to-one guidance from a published author-mentor, plus a tutorial with a literary agent. Mentoring sessions will take place via Zoom/phone calls. As you would expect, accessibility adjustments can be made – for example, by providing a British Sign Language interpreter.

This is an exciting opportunity. You have nothing to lose by applying except perhaps the hours of hard work that will go into producing a statement about what you want to write and why. Even then at the end of the process you will have a better understanding of yourself and your writing ambitions and that’s no bad thing.

Find out more about The Breakthrough Mentoring Scheme HERE

Apply HERE

And please please spread the word!

Image credits:

Alexander Grey on Unsplash
Prateek Katyal on Unsplash