A WIRRAL writer has won an award at a national writing competition.

Ciara McVeigh won the gold prize for creative non fiction at the 2024 Creative Future Writers’ Awards for her piece, A Space That Speaks which explores a compulsive behaviour rooted in anxiety and the tentative beginnings of self-acceptance.

The awards are now in their eleventh year and are the UK’s only national writing competition and development programme for underrepresented writers who traditionally lack opportunities due to mental health issues, disability, identity, health or social circumstance.

Ciara is a freelance writer who has written for lifestyle magazines in the UK and Ireland. 

She was a finalist in the 2023 Writers & Artists Working Class Writers’ Prize and former winner of the Women’s Words Manchester writing competition 2018.

Ciara is currently working on her first full length manuscript, a collection of creative nonfiction entitled Narrow Waters.

Judge of the 2024 Creative Future Writers’ Award, poet, writer and essayist, Nina Mingya Powles, said: “Judging the Creative Future Awards this year was an invigorating and challenging process.

“The shortlist of many innovative writers offered a glimpse of some of the most exciting writing being produced in the UK today.

“In the Poetry and Fiction categories, writers boldly pushed boundaries of genre and form. In Creative Non-Fiction there was an incredible range of stories and voices covering subjects I'd not encountered before.

“I was drawn all the way in and longed to keep reading. It's been a joy and an honour to be involved in this prize that is helping to reshape our literary landscape.”

The awards saw 1,600 submissions from unpublished writers from across the UK with gender identity, betrayal, rites of passage and lived experiences of transition, cancer treatment, and being in care among the themes explored in the fifteen winning entries across fiction, creative non-fiction, and poetry.

An awards ceremony featuring the winning writers and head judges will take place at the Southbank Centre’s London Literature Festival on Saturday, October 26 at 7.30pm.

Alongside the £23,000 worth of cash and top writing development prizes supplied by publishers, authors and development agencies, the winners are offered training, mentoring and support.