We are pleased to announce the Windrush Commissions – Mouth Mek Fi Nyam. This initiative is part of a four-part project celebrating Caribbean storytelling and heritage while supporting the campaign to make Lewisham the UK’s first Borough of Literature.
The wider project includes a series of oral history, gardening, cooking, and poetry workshops with Caribbean elders, highlighting the deep connections between migration, food, and cultural preservation.
About the opportunity
We are seeking two Caribbean short story writers to take part in an oral history event with Caribbean elders on Windrush Day, 22 June 2025, at Catford Library, 2 – 4pm. The event will focus on themes of migration, food, gardening, and cultural preservation, with elders sharing personal experiences of carrying and sustaining traditions across generations. The two chosen writers will attend the event and then use the shared stories as inspiration to create original short stories (1,500-2,500 words) that capture the richness of Caribbean heritage. The commissioned stories will be published in the Mouth Mek Fi Nyam anthology, and each writer will receive a £1,000 fee.
Timeline and fee
- Submission Period: 1 – 25 April 2025
- Shortlisted writers’ interviews (online): 28 April 2025
- Notification of Selection: 30 April 2025
- Event Date: 22 June 2025, 2– 4pm
- Outcome: One short story 1,500- 2,500 words that will be published in the Mouth Mek Fi Nyam anthology
- Fee: £1,000 inclusive
Who are the commissions for?
Two short story writers who are aged 18+, of Caribbean descent and currently living in London. Priority will be given to writers living in or from Lewisham.
Eligibility & Requirements:
- Must be aged 18+
- Must be of Caribbean heritage
- Must be based in London
- Must have experience in short story writing
- Must be available to attend the oral history sharing event on 22 June 2025 in person
How to Apply:
Submissions open 1 April 2025, and close 25 April 2025. There will be an online interview on Monday 28 April, 2025 for shortlisted writers. Selected writers will be notified by 30 April 2025.
To apply, please send:
- A short bio (max 200 words)
- A sample of your short fiction (max 2,000 words)
- A brief statement (max 300 words) on why this project interests you and how your work aligns with the themes of migration, food, gardening, and cultural preservation
- A short paragraph (max 300 words) on how you would engage with the oral history event to develop your short story
If you would like to request any reasonable adjustments to the application process, please contact us via [email protected].
For full eligibility criteria, please see our Terms and Conditions.
This is a unique opportunity to engage with community history, honour the voices of Caribbean elders, and create literary work that continues the legacy of Windrush storytelling. We look forward to reading your submission!
Accessible versions
A word version of this opportunity
An audio recording of this opportunity – coming soon
A BSL interpretation of this opportunity – coming soon
Funded by:
Photo credit: (C) Lola Oh
class="post-74205 post type-post status-publish format-standard has-post-thumbnail hentry category-news"Just published: Sick To Death by London Writers Awards alumni Chris Bridges
A huge congratulations to our London Writers Awards alumni Chris Bridges, on the publication of his debut novel, thriller Sick To Death, which went on sale on 27 March 2025.
Avon Books acquired the rights to the debut thriller in September 2024.
The Guardian included Sick To Death in a round up of crime and thriller novels in February 20025, writing; “Bridges, who was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2020, writes in an author note that he had had enough of the “tired tropes” around sickness in fiction, from the “sickly sweet ill woman”, to the unwell person who is shown to be a fraud. Sick to Death turns these tropes on their head: Emma is a force to be reckoned with, and although the plot does become increasingly tangled, this is deliciously dark and twisted, and a lot of fun.”
Chris Bridges took part in the 2022 London Writers Awards. Of his experience, Chris said; “The London Writers Award was invaluable to me as a debut writer. I was able to hone my craft and identify areas that needed attention and work. I’ve also become part of a community of writers, which has increased my confidence and almost, but not entirely, vanquished my new writer imposter syndrome.”
The London Writers Awards aim to increase the number of writers from under-represented communities being taken up by agents and publishers. It has supported 120 writers and has become the most successful writer development scheme in the UK with 50 writers agented and over 35 book deals.
class="post-74138 post type-post status-publish format-standard has-post-thumbnail hentry category-creative-writing category-network-knowledge"Kodak Moment by Anya Hunt-Byer
This work was first published in Spread the Word’s Young Writers Collective Anthology, 2025. This anthology stands as a testament to the courage, creativity, and growth of a remarkable group of young poets who have spent seven months exploring the power of language and self-expression. The anthology is more than a collection of poems—it is a celebration of emerging voices, of stories told with boldness and vulnerability.
All of the poems can be read here on our website, or you can download the Young Writer’s Collective Anthology to read as a PDF.
Kodak Moment by Anya Hunt-Byer
So, we meet again.
She picks it up: the Minolta 404 DSI—
The lens: D i S f I g U r I n g I t’ S s E l F
To focus on the moment.
A flash
A dark room;
Two bodies lying in a bed at 1 am.
A bokeh of hands wrapped around each other,
Heartbeats shuttering against chests
Chiaroscuro bedsheets kissing naked skin,
Pillows cradling heads
Freeze –
What is the opposite of time?
Then –
Flash sync, 1/90th of a second;
Lens shifts to double exposure,
Double exposure,
Gives way to
Thaw
The hitched sound of a rib cracking;
Fragmented into augmented fourths.
The sound of it falls on empty ears.
Lens irrigating under the weight of realisations,
Autofocus gives way to manual,
Tears tonguetied by time
Captured by a wide aperture lens
Two bodies lying in a bed at 1 am.
About Anya Hunt-Byer
Anya Hunt-Byer (she/they)is a writer, actor, and artist. Her work explores the complexities of Sapphic love and the disabled experience. In 2024, Anya debuted on stage at Theatre Peckham with Poetic Unity’s Spoken Word Theatre Company and showcased their art in NC Production’s “Shades of Resistance” exhibition at the Bomb Factory, Marylebone. Anya trained at the Oxford School of Drama on their foundation course and holds a First Class Honours degree in Creative Writing from Birkbeck University.
class="post-74134 post type-post status-publish format-standard has-post-thumbnail hentry category-creative-writing category-network-knowledge"Ghazal for Single Sided Deafness by Anya Hunt-ByerThis work was first published in Spread the Word’s Young Writers Collective Anthology, 2025. This anthology stands as a testament to the courage, creativity, and growth of a remarkable group of young poets who have spent seven months exploring the power of language and self-expression. The anthology is more than a collection of poems—it is a celebration of emerging voices, of stories told with boldness and vulnerability.
All of the poems can be read here on our website, or you can download the Young Writer’s Collective Anthology to read as a PDF.
Ghazal for Single Sided Deafness by Anya Hunt-Byer
Sometimes, a newborn babe is born congenitally deaf, Her inner ear asleep, boneless, compartmentally deaf.
Her redeemer arrives with scalpel and batteries, eager to fix her. On her knees, lacking equilibrium— pray-for-me- deaf?
Hearing words like 2D protocol – unilateral deaf,
Man’s explicit tongues captioned by fistfuls of bleeding palms, tonally deaf.
Their savoirism tries to kiss her, something to sink their teeth into, She reels the cost- they devour and love us, horribly deaf.
She wonders what it means to love a woman, freely.
The answer? No dissection, no cure, just truth- Queerly deaf.
One foot implanted, cochlear ablaze, she kisses you.
Religion becomes her fingerpicking guitars and you’re listening
Missing the beat-
Of abstract notes
sounds fistful,
hearing aid batteries
entangled.
In such moments,
she wouldn’t change her
circumstances for the world.
Freely deaf.
Blissfully deaf.
Exceptionally deaf.
O O
\ /
( )
|
About Anya Hunt-Byer
Anya Hunt-Byer (she/they)is a writer, actor, and artist. Her work explores the complexities of Sapphic love and the disabled experience. In 2024, Anya debuted on stage at Theatre Peckham with Poetic Unity’s Spoken Word Theatre Company and showcased their art in NC Production’s “Shades of Resistance” exhibition at the Bomb Factory, Marylebone. Anya trained at the Oxford School of Drama on their foundation course and holds a First Class Honours degree in Creative Writing from Birkbeck University.
class="post-74143 post type-post status-publish format-standard has-post-thumbnail hentry category-creative-writing category-network-knowledge"Another J Name I Now Resent by Alice FoxallThis work was first published in Spread the Word’s Young Writers Collective Anthology, 2025. This anthology stands as a testament to the courage, creativity, and growth of a remarkable group of young poets who have spent seven months exploring the power of language and self-expression. The anthology is more than a collection of poems—it is a celebration of emerging voices, of stories told with boldness and vulnerability.
All of the poems can be read here on our website, or you can download the Young Writer’s Collective Anthology to read as a PDF.
Another J Name I Now Resent by Alice Foxall
I never liked your Spotify playlists
or your unkept hair
never liked the melody of your words
as you tried to lie politely.
I never liked the movies
or the late-night calls
never liked how clammy your hands made mine as
you clasped them in the dark.
Like electrons repulsed by the charge of each other
we are parallel lines
glancing in each other’s direction
destined never to coincide and
I’m completely content.
But since you ask,
I still smell it.
The stench of selfishness and solitude
follows you like the flu.
People call you brother, son, friend
but your soul is used and tarnished
like the car you crashed last year
trying to find yourself.
Do they know?
You stick to my memory like spider webs tangled
between my tendons.
I tell myself
that you will be the one to cave in
Becoming nothing but dust and aching
You will.
youwillyouwillyouwillwillyou
Look to me with eyes ice blue
as they all leave you the way you left me.
Reach for me one final time
and I will come running.
About Alice Foxall
Alice (she/they) is a multidisciplinary artist based in London. Having studied biomedical science at university her work is often sci-fi inspired. Her dystopian short stories and poetry podcast, The Project, was released in collaboration with Roundhouse this year. Her short film on being mixed-race and cultural dysphoria is currently being shown at the Migration Museum until Spring 2025. These themes are becoming more apparent in her work.
class="post-74145 post type-post status-publish format-standard has-post-thumbnail hentry category-creative-writing category-network-knowledge"Don’t take me by Alice FoxallThis work was first published in Spread the Word’s Young Writers Collective Anthology, 2025. This anthology stands as a testament to the courage, creativity, and growth of a remarkable group of young poets who have spent seven months exploring the power of language and self-expression. The anthology is more than a collection of poems—it is a celebration of emerging voices, of stories told with boldness and vulnerability.
All of the poems can be read here on our website, or you can download the Young Writer’s Collective Anthology to read as a PDF.
Don’t take me by Alice Foxall
Please don’t take me yet
I have only just discovered how much better pasta tastes out of a bowl
and that if you blend the matcha powder with the syrup it stops them separating
I’ve only just perfected cooking chicken
(perfecting it once is once enough I won’t be doing that again but)
Lord, it feels good to know.
Please don’t take me yet, I met a girl.
I think I might love her.
I need the chance to try.
She smells like sleep and honey
and smiles like she knows things I don’t.
I finally have a routine for laundry.
My light can survive my dark and
there is in fact no use in fabric softener
or for gut health fizzy drinks
that taste as bland as city skies
Or holding onto my hatred for those who don’t apologise
like a God holds onto eternity.
I know
It was not so long I was wishing in reverse
for your hand to smite me and take me away from this place
where the chicken is always raw
and the pasta always goes cold
but I hope you didn’t hear me.
I get on with my brother now
in ways I never thought I could.
My favourite flowers have a name I can’t pronounce and
a smell I cannot describe
he brings them to me every birthday and Christmas.
Sometimes in between.
My optician’s appointment is next month.
My Spanish class starts next year.
My life starts after just one more heartbreak.
Please
To whoever it may concern,
Don’t take me
Just yet.
About Alice Foxall
Alice (she/they) is a multidisciplinary artist based in London. Having studied biomedical science at university her work is often sci-fi inspired. Her dystopian short stories and poetry podcast, The Project, was released in collaboration with Roundhouse this year. Her short film on being mixed-race and cultural dysphoria is currently being shown at the Migration Museum until Spring 2025. These themes are becoming more apparent in her work.