
Phillip Schofield, me, and Amanda Holden on ITV’s ‘This Morning’.
A few weeks ago, I entered the ITV/Curtis Brown literary competition ‘Be A Best Seller’. I had to send in 2,500-3,000 words of a novel or novel-in-progress, so I sent in the beginning of When We Get There, a novel I wrote 20,000 words of during my third year of university for one of my modules. After a while, I gave up hope of getting anywhere in the competition – I even got the dates mixed up for when we were supposed to hear anything, and so moved on and thought nothing of it. But then on Friday 21st November, I got a call from ITV (a TV channel in Britain, for any non-UK readers) and was told I was a finalist! I was invited to go to the studios that coming Monday for a ‘chat’ on their mid-morning show, ‘This Morning’. Unfortunately, the train broke down 5 minutes out of Paddington Station so we had to divert our route, and I missed my chance to go on the sofa with the presenters and talk about the novel. Fortunately, I had no idea I was even meant to be on TV, so I was pretty chilled out, all things considering! All week the finalists went to the studios to talk about their writing, when it culminated on Thursday 27th and the winner, out of us 5, was announced on air. The finalists all met each other and spent a few hours chatting before the show, getting to know each other, having our hair and make-up done etc. Then we had to go into the studio for the filming and… I won! I was so shocked, I said “Oh my God” about 17 times and cried (thankfully when the cameras turned off!). The judges were the novelist Marian Keyes, the actress Caroline Quentin and the literary agent Jonny Geller, and they were all really lovely, so that was nice! The Curtis Brown agency itself is really prestigious and they have a lot of successful people on their books – writers, actors, performers etc! For the prize itself, I’ve won a free place on Curtis Brown’s 6 month writing course in London, and representation by the agency for my novel. So… I have an agent! I’M SO HAPPY!!! It’s been a week since it happened and it still doesn’t feel real!
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