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Press release just in...
‘Living your dreams’ is theme for Arthritis Care's creative writing competition 2008.
Climb every mountain, ford every stream….wordsmiths with arthritis could win a top writing course by sharing tales of how they challenged pain and disability to achieve their personal dreams.
‘We want you to write about how you’ve realised a dream by defying the constraints of arthritis. Not necessarily climbing Everest or winning the Lottery, but the everyday triumph of excelling your limits to achieve an ambition. It’s about how you made things happen for yourself. Perhaps you managed to climb to a breathtaking view you’d always wanted to see, or dared to try a flying lesson? Maybe you learned to swim, or made an internet date, or started a life-changing hobby which brought a new circle of friends?’ said Kate Llewelyn, Arthritis Care’s head of information services.
This is Arthritis Care’s second annual literary competition. As in 2007, the adult prize is a tutored residential course in creative writing at the Arvon Foundation, while the winner of the under-18 category will receive an iPod.
‘Writing creatively can be a great outlet for anyone. But when you live with a painful and debilitating condition like arthritis, it opens a world of the imagination where you can rise above mobility constraints and channel pain and frustration into something concrete.
‘This competition will encourage writers with arthritis to explore and share events and experiences about controlling the condition, creating poems and stories to inspire others,’ says Kate.
The judges will look for entries that take the theme ‘Living your dreams’ as a starting-point and show how the writer has taken charge of their disease to experience or accomplish something personally important.
‘By taking control and challenging your arthritis, maybe you have experienced exhilaration or delight, become fitter, or more sociable and confident, learned a new skill, or even found your partner or best friend. If so, get writing, because we want to read all about it,’ said Kate.
The competition is open only to people with arthritis. Writers can use any literary form. There are two categories – one for young people aged from 13 to18, and one for adults, aged 19 and over.
Notes to editors
The prize for the winning adult entry is a five-day residential writing course at any one of the Arvon Foundation’s four writing centres in Shropshire, Devon, West Yorkshire and Inverness-shire. The young person’s prize is an iPod, kindly donated by London’s Oxford Street branch of John Lewis.
Entries should be no longer than 750 words in English, and should be submitted by 12 noon 30 June 2008 to creative@arthritiscare.org.uk, or by post to: Creative Writing Competition, Arthritis Care, 18 Stephenson Way, London, NW1 2HD. Only one entry per person is allowed. |
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