Gold Dust is delighted to announce that one of our recent mentees, Carmel Boyhan Irvine, mentored by Shelley Weiner, has won the Grazia First Chapter Award, celebrated recently at the party for the Women’s Prize for Fiction. We extend our warmest congratulations to her for this prestigious and hotly contested win.
Carmel, a twin, a doctor and a medical educator, lives in Plymouth. Carmel writes: ‘I will always regard my mentoring by Shelley Weiner at Gold Dust as the start of my writing career. The publishing world is a competitive business. Shelley, whose extraordinary life experiences inform her own remarkable writing, is an exceptional tutor who guided my literary fiction novel, The First Slice, from first chapter to first draft in a process that was nurturing of both the novel and its author from beginning to end.’
Carmel’s novel The First Slice is a short literary fiction novel exploring connection, loss and the greater loneliness of incomplete remembering.
