I’m excited to share the winners of this year’s residency at the beautiful Harrison Hotel. You can read a the long list of writing help the winners receive over at The Harrison website and while you’re there check out the amazing, muti-award-winning Harrison Hotel where they will stay for a week with host Melanie Harrision. Now to the winners…

Tenaya Steed is a visual artist and emerging writer. Her artwork has been supported by BBC Arts, Arts Council England, and The British Council. She is an alumni of The Stinging Fly 6-month fiction programme, and Granta’s Literary Short Fiction workshop. Her story, Heavenly Mutha, won The Michael McLaverty Short Story Award in 2024. Another story, Missing the Eclipse, was published in The Stinging Fly’s 2024 summer issue. She was selected for The Irish Writers Centre’s National Mentoring Programme 2024, paired with mentor Wendy Erskine. Tenaya lives in Dublin and teaches Illustration at the National College of Art and Design. She is currently working on her first book, Canada House, named after the since demolished council flats she started out in.

Leeor Ohayon is a writer from London, based in Norwich where he is working on his PhD in Creative and Critical Writing at the University of East Anglia. His work has featured in the London Magazine, the White Review, Apartamento, Brick Lane Bookshop New Short Stories 2021 & 2023, Paper Brigade, RSL Review and Prospect Magazine.

And the Writing West Midlands is…

Jane Commane was born in Coventry and lives in Warwickshire. She is a tutor, mentor, writer of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, and director / editor at Nine Arches Press. Jane is alumni of Writing West Midlands’ Room 204 writer development scheme, and was awarded the Jerwood Compton Poetry Fellowship in 2017-18. Her first poetry collection Assembly Lines, was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2018. Her poems have been anthologised in The Best British Poems (Salt Publishing), Being Human (Bloodaxe Books) and featured in The Guardian, and on BBC Radio 2, 4 and 6 Music. Jane has written essays about writing and the nature of creativity for several publications and anthologies, and co-wrote, with Jo Bell, the handbook and creative guide How to be a Poet (Nine Arches Press). She is currently working on both non-fiction and fiction writing projects; a book on living the creative life, and a novel set in the West Midland edgelands at the turn of the twenty-first century. www.janecommane.com

Congratulations to all the winners.