There is good news for the 900 odd writers on WriteClique.net, the British Council’s website for aspiring writers in the English language.
The website was designed five years ago to enable creative writers to have their work showcased free of charge, without the heavy costs of publishing. Even so the website has outlived the wildest expectations of the original organisers. In a country where English is not the first language, internet penetration is minimal and very little creative writing is published in English, WriteClique.net’s success is nothing short of extraordinary. Today WriteClique.net has around 4000 visitors a month viewing almost 30,000 pages.
The site now hosts nearly 950 writers, showcasing more than 12,000 pieces of writing including poems, short stories, plays, prose and blogs. Over the years WriteClique.net has grown into more than a writing website – it has become an online community.
As a way of celebrating a successful five years and giving back something to its dedicated membership, WriteClique is organising an intensive three month creative writing workshop to be conducted by Louise Doughty, a leading UK author.
The process will begin with a 3-day master class to be conducted in Colombo from April 4 -6. These will be intense eight hour sessions.
Participants will then be asked to submit three creative writing projects over a period of three months. During this time, Louise will give the writers personal feedback and meet all the writers once a month via the Web, to set projects and discuss progress.
This will enable the writers to be personally tutored one – on–one by Louise. When the process is over, one piece of writing from each of these writers will be selected to form the basis of a WriteClique Anthology which will be published. For the first time, readers of WriteClique will be able to view at least some of the writings in book form.
The trainer, Louise Doughty is a novelist, playwright and critic. A graduate with an MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, she is the author of five novels; Crazy Paving, Dance With Me, Honey -Dew, Fires In The Dark and Stone Cradle. She has also written five plays for radio and worked widely as a critic and broadcaster in the UK, where she lives, and was a judge for the 2008 Man Booker Prize for fiction. She has also taught creative writing for a wide variety of institutions including the Arvon Foundation and Birkbeck College. She is currently running the creative writing program at the Faber Academy.
According to the organisers the aim is not only to showcase Sri Lankan writing in English, but to also to develop it. This is the first part in this process and WriteClique members will see many other opportunities to present their work to the world this year.
This opportunity is open to all contributing members of WriteClique.net. Participation is free of charge, but limited to 15 writers, who will be selected from the entries. (Please refer the WriteClique website for details on how to enter).
The next step for WriteClique, according to webmaster/Editor, Delon Weerasinghe is to form a network of writers. So far, WriteClique boasts a membership ranging from the established and the famous to the up and coming as well as completely unknown quantity.
Several winners of the Gratiaen award were members of WriteClique first. Its members include Carl Muller, Viviemarie Vanderpoorten and Ashok Ferrey amongst others.
A majority of those who won the Gratiaen prize or have been shortlisted for it have been and still are Writeclique members according to Delon.
Delon himself is an established writer and a Gratiaen award winner. Asked whether he himself was a member of writeClique, he replied, “I was the third member to join. In the initial stages, we used the website ourselves to see how smoothly it functioned and to check it for glitches.”
The website has come a long way since then, says Delon, “We can now see a decided increase in the quantity and quality of writing being published in English in Sri Lanka. “While WriteClique can’t take the full credit for that, I believe that we contributed a lot towards it.”
|
E-mail