Congratulations to five CWP students and alumni whose work was selected to appear in Kemptown Bookshop’s fiftieth anniversary anthology Love Letters to Bookshops.
Tim Blake, who is in the second year of the Creative Writing Programme in Worthing, wrote a ghost story called The Victoria Station Book Club. He was joined by his coursemate Alex Kendall whose piece of flash fiction Eat Your Words was selected by the judges for inclusion. Kavita Chhiba, an alumni of the two-year programme who is now studying on the Advanced Writers Workshops, had a piece of flash fiction The Bookshop Escape included. Meanwhile Christine Lugrine who took the 10-week Introduction to Creative Writing course in 2026, had a piece of flash fiction titled Church included. Finally poetry alumni Roz Doe’s poem Pilgrims was selected.
Our Beginners Poetry course tutor Roy Mcfarlane was also commissioned to write a poem for the anthology.
The anthology was published last month to mark fifty years of Kemptown Bookshop in Brighton. More than 120 people entered the writing competition which was themed around bookshops. The judges – Anna Jefferson from New Writing South, poet Roy Mcfarlane, Jess Moriarty from the University of Brighton, Sean Campbell at Epoque Press, crime writer William Shaw, and writer, bookshop owner and CWP director Cathy Hayward – narrowed the entries down through a blind judging process to the twenty whose work was published. Congratulations to them all.
The anthology costs £10 and you can buy copies here or from Kemptown Bookshop, which is based at 91 St George’s Road, Brighton BN2 1EE.