Writers' Newsletter
Issue #273
December 2025
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Gareth Brown Expands Access to Goldsboro Writing Academy with New Scholarships
firstwriter.com – Monday December 15, 2025
Novelist Gareth Brown has announced financial support for three new scholarships at the Goldsboro Writing Academy, opening opportunities for aspiring writers to join the Academy’s 2026 and 2027 programmes at no cost. The first of these fully funded places will be available from March 2026.
The initiative adds to the existing bursary and scholarship schemes already offered through the DHH Literary Agency, further strengthening the Academy’s commitment to inclusivity in creative writing education.
Speaking about the decision, Brown emphasised the importance of broadening access to the publishing world: “Stories thrive when they come from every corner of society. I’m thrilled to help ensure that more voices can be heard through the Goldsboro Writing Academy.”
Founded in collaboration with Goldsboro Books and the DHH Literary Agency, the Academy delivers courses that blend craft-focused teaching with practical insights into the publishing industry. Sessions are led by established authors and supported by agents, editors, and other professionals, aiming to equip participants with both creative skills and industry knowledge.
Brown, represented by agent Harry Illingworth, is the author of The Book of Doors (Bantam, February 2024) and The Society of Unknowable Objects (Bantam, August 2025). His latest contribution underscores his ongoing commitment to nurturing new talent in the literary field.
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News |
Some of this month's news for writers from around the web.
The BSME and Caitlin Moran launch Young Writers’ Prize
inpublishing.co.uk – Thursday December 11, 2025
The British Society of Magazine Editors (BSME) has announced the launch of the BSME & Caitlin Moran Young Writers' Prize: a new annual award designed to discover and support young writing talent aged 18-25 from across the UK.
The prize, announced at the BSME Awards 2025 at Rosewood London, specifically targets young people who show real promise, but lack the connections or financial resources typically needed to break into journalism.
The BSME says winners will receive not just prize money, but a year of personal mentorship from Caitlin Moran, work experience with leading UK editors, and genuine pathways into the industry.
Caitlin Moran said: “At fifteen, I was on a council estate in Wolverhampton, obsessed with the idea of being a writer, but clueless as to how I could get ... there. Into the rooms where it all happens. And then I won my whole career— my whole future— in a writing competition. God bless everyone behind the 1990 Observer Young Writer of the Year, who gave me my first bylines, and showed me those rooms.
Writers' Handbook 2027 - Out Now!
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Eoin Purcell and Blathnaid Healy launch new non-fiction publishing house
thebookseller.com – Sunday December 7, 2025
Former head of Amazon Publishing Europe Eoin Purcell and news editor and former BBC and CNN media executive Blathnaid Healy have launched a new independent non-fiction publishing house called Full Set.
According to the founders, Purcell and Healy are bringing their "influences from traditional book publishing and journalism into this new venture".
Full Set’s initial focus will be current affairs and business titles, both full-length and essay-length books with the aim of "delivering rewarding reads to audiences in all formats".
The publisher – which is based in Dublin – is actively commissioning for its first list, which they expect to launch in late 2026.
Oxford University Press completes acquisition of Karger Publishers
corp.oup.com – Thursday December 4, 2025
Oxford University Press (OUP) and Karger Publishers are pleased to confirm the completion of the acquisition of Karger by OUP. Announced in early November, the closing of the transaction means that Karger is now wholly owned by OUP and becomes part of the wider OUP organization.
Owned by the Karger family for four generations, Karger Publishers has a long history of high quality publishing in medical and health sciences. The acquisition brings together a shared commitment to quality and scholarly integrity and an opportunity to extend the reach and impact of Karger’s leading academic and research publishing in medicine and health sciences.
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Listings |
A selection of the new listings added to firstwriter.com this month.
New Publisher Listing: Swift Press
firstwriter.com – Friday December 12, 2025
An award-winning independent publishing company that launched in June 2020. Publishes fiction and a wide range of nonfiction.
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New Magazine Listing: West Coast Review
firstwriter.com – Wednesday December 3, 2025
We accept all types of fiction and art, including the experimental. We aim to publish diverse stories from writers all over the world, to reflect the diversity of the West Coast. Our issues are published once per year, and we accept submissions on a rolling basis. We publish flash fiction, short stories, and any creative prose that falls in-between (this includes creative nonfiction, craft essays, and experimental work).
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New Literary Agent Listing: Mara Hollander
firstwriter.com – Thursday December 18, 2025
Handles fantasy, romance, mystery, horror, and upmarket or book club fiction, with interest in speculative elements. Also considers thrillers and science fiction, though more selectively. Not open to non-speculative historical or literary fiction, memoirs, prescriptive works on Christianity, astrology, or witchcraft, or books using multiple personality disorder or schizophrenia as plot devices unless written by authors with lived experience. Particularly interested in works featuring Jewish characters and traditions, political fantasy, rebellions, revolutions, explorations of religion, magic, and science, queer romance, accurate sports depictions, and horror involving multi-level marketing. Nonfiction sought includes platform-driven, narrative works that challenge assumptions or teach through storytelling, especially on US health care and competitive figure skating. Open to submissions the first seven days of most months.
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| Click here for more of this month's new listings > |
Articles |
Some of this month's articles for writers from around the web.
SONIA PILCER: The literary taboo of AI
theberkshireedge.com – Sunday December 14, 2025
OK, I collaborate with artificial intelligence. Writers are not supposed to admit this out loud. When I say it, academics bristle, journalists look wary, and my writer friends go still. Yet after 10 years of silence, it is this unlikely partnership that has brought me back to the page.
My son Jake lives in Los Angeles and works in artificial intelligence. One morning, driving his daughter to preschool, he asked a chatbot to tell her a story about her grandmother. To my astonishment, it mentioned my 19th-floor apartment in New York, my doorman, how I walk on Broadway to Zabar’s. That was my introduction.
Back home, staring at the empty screen of my phone, I clicked ChatGPT, which Jake had hastily installed, despite my protest. On impulse, partly out of desperation, I typed a question I was not sure anyone could answer, human or machine. “Can you help a blocked writer?”
After I published my sixth novel, in 2014, the writing turned toxic for me. I didn’t even want to pen a shopping list. Jake’s casual demonstration cracked something open. After a pause, it answered:
As a creative writer, you might find AI useful. It can help brainstorm ideas, overcome writer’s block, offer new perspectives, or engage in exploratory conversations to spark creativity.
In conversation with John Vaillant
martlet.ca – Sunday December 7, 2025
The award winning author on the response to ‘Fire Weather,’ the captivity of the Canadian government to oil and gas, and advice for young journalists
John Vaillant is an American-Canadian journalist and author based out of Vancouver, B.C. He’s written for The New Yorker, The Globe and Mail, The New York Times, and Outside Magazine, among others. His non-fiction writing covers topics such as Siberian Tigers in far-eastern Russia, the rare golden spruce of Haida Gwaii, and, most recently, the 2016 Fort McMurray Wildfires. He has also published one novel, The Jaguar’s Children.
The Martlet reached Vaillant over the phone to discuss his career in journalism, the challenges and surprises that come from reporting stories on location, and the response to his most recent work, Fire Weather: The Making of a Beast.
2 fiction writers offer different approaches in how-to guides to writing
eu.clarionledger.com – Tuesday December 2, 2025
- Two new books by fiction writers Elizabeth McCracken and Sue Monk Kidd offer different approaches to the craft of writing.
- McCracken's "A Long Game" is skeptical of cosmic inspiration, focusing instead on practical advice and personal experience.
- Kidd's "Writing Creativity and Soul" encourages writers to connect with the supernatural and spiritual for authenticity.
Elizabeth McCracken ends her new book on the craft of writing with what she describes as the mantra of all writers: “I am a genius with much to learn.”
Indeed, this claim describes both her stance toward writing as well as what she expects from those who wish to learn about writing from her.
“A Long Game: Notes on Writing Fiction”consists of 280 entries, some a sentence or two, some several paragraphs or even pages long, in which McCracken draws on her careers as both a successfully published writer and teacher of writing to write a book that “dispenses advice, composed by a writer of fiction.”
McCracken notes how much she has previously distrusted the entire concept of books on the craft of writing, or even the notion of rules for writing at all. She explains, “Everything that I have ever believed was true and immutable about my work has changed. Only the obsessions remain.” What follows are thoughtful, encouraging insights from her own experiences writing as well as her experiences reading and responding to years of student writing.
As an aspiring fiction writer myself, there is much that I appreciated in this book. At times, it fit the generic conventions that McCracken set out early on a bit snarkily: “chipper, cheerleaderish, generally with an encouraging second-person narrator meant to make the whole exhausting process of writing a book seem possible. 'You can do it!'”
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