Our Patron: Helen Dunmore

I support Cyprus Well because it is passionate about literature in the South West, and intends to make sure that writing and writers become part of everyone's life. There are so many ways in which literature enriches lives. Children in small village schools get the chance to enjoy poetry workshops or writer visits. Families visit festivals, and sample songwriting or storytelling. A short story writer enters a competition, and takes the first step on the ladder to publication. Cyprus Well will be part of all this.

Helen Dunmore is a novelist, poet, short-story and children's writer. Among other awards she has received the Orange Prize for Fiction, the MacKitterick Prize, the Poetry Society's Alice Hunt Bartlett Award, the Signal Award for Poetry and the Nestlé Children's Book Prize Silver Medal. She was the winner of the 2009 National Poetry Competition. Her latest novel is The Betrayal, published in 2010. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a former Chair of the Society of Authors.

On The Betrayal:

"Historians have written capably about the horror of Stalin's 1952 "Doctors' Plot", as they have written about the Siege of Leningrad which preceded it. But it takes the skill of a very superior novelist to make the unimaginable real. Dunmore is just such a novelist: brave, tender and with a unique gift for immersing the reader in the taste, smell and fear of a story. Writing like hers reminds us that human life is always more than just a statistic."

Katy Guest, The Independent on Sunday

www.helendunmore.com

Helen Dunmore at contemporarywriters.com 

Helen Dunmore on Film

(courtesy Bloodaxe Books)

Helen Dunmore from Neil Astley

Please click on the above links to watch in higher resolution.