2015 success stories for MA students, graduates

The cover of prestigious literary magazine Ambit's issue 219

Only a few weeks into 2015 and we're already celebrating success stories achieved by current students and recent graduates of the Creative Writing MA at Edinburgh Napier University. For example, a story by part-timer Sasha Callaghan is featured in prestigious literary quarterly Ambit. Those Steps Ahead was developed through the MA's unique mentoring module.

Recent graduate Anne Hogg had her first professional production as a playwright last month when Glasgow's Oran Mor selected her two-hander Butterfly as the lead-off show for a new season of A Play, A Pie and A Pint. The play is a black comedy about complicated lives, loves, buried secrets and a geriatric baby with an extreme fear of heights.

Final covers have been released for two graduates' novels being published this year. Wasp Or, A Very Sweet Power by Ian Garbutt is due out in March from Polygon. Here's the official blurb for the novel:

For a gentleman seeking more prestigious company amidst the bawdy houses of an eighteenth-century city, the House of Masques provides the perfect no-touch escorts. Girls, highly educated and socially trained, are geisha-like status symbols for politicians, bankers and royalty alike. Into this world comes Bethany Harris, a disgraced governess who has been rescued from a madhouse and transformed into the Masque named Wasp. She soon discovers that personal horrors, coupled with dark ambition, are leading to a crisis that threatens to destroy the House and everyone in it...

Catherine Simpson's Truestory is due out in September from Sandstone. Like Wasp, it started life as a major project on the Creative Writing MA. Here is the official blurb for the novel:

Alice's life is dictated by her autistic son, Sam, who refuses to leave their remote farm. With money running out and marriage to Duncan foundering, it seems Alice's life is shrinking to a vanishing point. But the arrival of a rootless wanderer creates fresh opportunities and dangers for everyone. Truestory examines how we are all trapped in our own ways but still have the power to can rewrite our lives. It looks at what happens when sacrifice slithers towards martyrdom, but ultimately will fill you with hope...