This year’s Non-Fiction collection offers an incredibly diverse range of topics, representing our varied backgrounds, interests, personalities and experiences, including a daughter who discovers that her mother narrowly escaped with her life; a frank, touching and often humorous account of a teenager undergoing cancer treatment; a eulogy for a life lost, but not to be forgotten; a psychological review of character through the lens of the disappearing art of handwriting; a daughter describes the early days of sea rescue and adventures experienced with her father, before health and safety curtailed the freedom of childhood; a philosophical autofiction on love, questioning the meaning of life; the controversial introduction of female students to a major public school in the seventies; and an in-depth, reconstructed, non-fiction approach to a notorious rape case. What draws us together is that we each have a compulsion to tell our stories.
This anthology arrests and intrigues – with sex workers, slaughterhouses, an epic flood, a sweat mark in the shape of a gun, and a boy that walks on water. These varied stories and novel extracts delve into issues such as identity, isolation, migration, family, the climate crisis, and how to live in a digital age. Each of these exemplary writers from the 2026 UEA Prose Fiction MA have something to say and are experimenting across modes to urgently share their perspective: from metafiction to eco-fiction, autofiction, sci-fi, and the grotesque; this global panoply of voices invites you to pull up a chair, dip into the book, and lose yourself in their visions.
Non-fiction foreword by George Szirtes: Born in Hungary in 1948, a child refugee of the 1956 Uprising, George Szirtes published his first book of poems, The Slant Door, in 1979. It won the Faber Prize. He has published many since then, winning, among others, the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2004 for which he has been twice shortlisted since. He has also won various international prizes for his translations of Hungarian literature including the Man Booker International award for translators for translations of László Krasznahorkai. In 2018 he was shortlisted for the Man Booker International award for his translation of Krasznahorkai's The World Goes On.
Non-fiction introduction by Claire Hynes: Claire Hynes is a lecturer in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. She writes fiction, non-fiction, memoir and theatre monologues.
Prose fiction foreword by Christie Watson: Christie Watson is a best-selling, award winning writer and Professor of Creative Writing at UEA. She has published eight books: four novels, including her first novel Tiny Sunbirds Far Away, which won the Costa First Novel Award, and four works of non-fiction, including nursing memoir, The Language of Kindness which was a number one Sunday Times bestseller and spent five months in the Top Ten Bestseller list. Christie is a contributor to the Times, Sunday Times, Guardian, Observer, Telegraph and TEDx. Her writing has been translated into twenty-three languages, and adapted for theatre. Killing Me Softly, her latest novel, will be released March 2026.
Prose fiction introduction by Henry Sutton: Henry Sutton is a crime writer, tutor, scholar, runner. He is Professor of Creative Writing and Crime Fiction at the University of East Anglia, and the author of 15 novels and a collection of short stories. He is also the co-editor of the series Elements in Crime Narratives, Cambridge University Press. He lives in Norfolk, England, and Catalunya.
