The Florence Staniforth Student Fiction Prize

The 2021 Florence Staniforth Student Fiction Prize goes to Mary Johnson with ‘Last House’.
Congratulations to all the students who made the shortlist!
Read more about the shortlist

The 2021 Lucy Cavendish College Student Fiction Prize is now closed. If you have any questions please contact fictionprize@lucy.cam.ac.uk
The Prize is for Lucy Cavendish Students in all subjects. Students need to submit a short story with a word limit of 4000 words.
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The College has a strong tradition of supporting and celebrating creative writers with the Lucy Cavendish Fiction Prize being testament to this. It has been the catalyst for numerous bestselling debuts and emerging literary talent. Last year the College introduced a prize for its own students too; the Florence Staniforth Student Fiction Prize.
Funded by the Florence Staniforth Award for Excellence in Creative Writing, the prize is for students from any discipline studying at Lucy Cavendish College. Students are invited to submit a short story to a panel of judges led by Fellow Emerita Dr Isobel Maddison. Also on the panel are published authors and creative writing teachers, Jo Browning Wroe and Miranda Doyle. The winner of the Student Prize will be awarded £100 and will be announced on the same evening as the main Fiction Prize award ceremony.
Isobel said:
“This is an exciting College prize open to students studying any subject. Short stories are a flexible way of communicating a central idea or developing the significance of a brief incident and much more. No experience of creative writing is needed to submit an entry. The judging panel are hoping for plenty of entries!”
To enter please send your short story to fictionprize@lucy.cam.ac.uk.

Dr Isobel Maddison - Fellow Emerita
Isobel is a Fellow Emerita of Lucy Cavendish College where she was College Lecturer and Director of Studies in English (2007-2021), as well being Vice-President from 2013-2019. She has published widely on writers including Katherine Mansfield, Dorothy Richardson, George Bernard Shaw, Max Beerbohm, Eric Ambler and Agatha Christie. She works primarily on the connections between modernism and popular literature and has spent many years researching and writing about Elizabeth von Arnim, an author of best-selling fiction and a frequent Book-of-the-Month choice in her heyday. Isobel was President of the International Elizabeth von Arnim Society from 2015-2019 and remains a member of the society's steering group as von Arnim's work comes into prominence once again.
​Jo Browning Wroe - Creative Writing Supervisor
Jo is Creative Writing Supervisor at Lucy Cavendish. Her debut novel, A Terrible Kindness, will be Faber’s superlead title in early 2022.  She worked in publishing for over ten years before studying for an MA in Creative Writing at UEA. She has written for educational publishers in the UK and the US, The New Statesman and the Church Times.
Miranda Doyle - Creative Writing Tutor, Writer and Teacher
Miranda teaches writing at the University of Cambridge’s Institute of Continuing Education and the Faber Academy. Her memoir, A Book for Untruths, was published by Faber in 2017 and she is one of Hawthornden’s 2020 Writing Fellows.