Bloomsbury Academic Writing Fellowship 2024
About
Bloomsbury and Writers & Artists are delighted to confirm the Bloomsbury Academic Writing Fellowship will run for a second successive year.
The purpose of the Bloomsbury Academic Writing Fellowship 2024 is to help early career academics get their book idea into a form which is ready for publication. If you are of African or African Caribbean heritage, based in the UK, and have an idea you would like to develop into an academic book but are unsure where to start, this Fellowship is for you.
The recipient of the Fellowship will receive a package of creative support throughout 2025. This will include editorial support and mentorship for one year, £1,000 of financial support, practical resources, and event and networking opportunities. The ultimate goal of this invaluable, industry-standard package of support is for the author to develop their work to a point in which they feel in a position to begin approaching prospective publishers.
'To ensure that the subjects covered by these works are wide-ranging and topical, your manuscript should focus on one of the following UN Sustainable Development Goals or cover a key thematic topic from across the Humanities and Social Sciences such as: Gender and sexuality; Economics and international development; Social welfare, society and communities; Politics, current affairs and government; Equality and diversity; Climate and environment; History and cultural heritage; Popular culture and media; Literary studies.
To Enter
Simply submit a short statement (<200 words) about how your work aims to educate and inspire within one or more of the key thematic areas listed below. You must also include a 200-word synopsis of your work, and a 1,000-1,500 word sample extract.
It is possible to start and then save an application. Saved applications are stored under the 'My competition entries' section of your W&A dashboard.
Key thematic areas
Relevant United Nations Sustainable Development goal/s
Gender and sexuality
Economics and international development
Social welfare, society and communities
Politics, current affairs and government
Equality and diversity
Climate and environment
History and cultural heritage
Popular culture and media
Literary studies
Dates and further announcements
Our 2024 closing date for entries is 23:59 (GMT) Sunday 10th November 2024. The successful applicant(s), as chosen by our judging panel, will be announced in January 2025.
Click here to read about the first ever recipient of the Bloomsbury Academic Writing Fellowship
Judging panel
David Avital is Editorial Director for Bloomsbury Politics, International Development and Area Studies. David has nearly 20 years’ experience in scholarly publishing across a number of subject areas at Bloomsbury, Continuum and Routledge.
Dr Aleida Borges leads the Grassroots Women Leaders research stream at the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership (GIWL) and is a Visiting Lecturer at the African Leadership Centre at King’s College London. Her research offers critical perspectives at the intersection of politics, gender and decoloniality.
Dr Constantino Dumangane, Jr is a Senior Lecturer / Assistant Professor at the University of York. He serves as the Deputy Postgraduate Programme Director and is an active board member of his University’s Staff Race Equality Forum and EDI Action Group. He has published in the British Education Research Journal and Qualitative Research. His most recently publication chronicling the experiences of Black male students in UK Higher education can be found in Blackness at the Intersection (2024).
Nayiri Kendir is Commissioning Editor for Environmental Politics and Political Sociology at Bloomsbury Academic. Nayiri has worked at Bloomsbury Publishing since 2018, across subject areas including Politics & International Relations and Middle East Studies.
Eli Keren is a non-fiction agent at Curious Minds. He was previously at United Agents for eight years. He has been a regular judge on the Pat Kavanagh Prize and the Page Turner Awards and was an industry judge for the London Library’s Emerging Writers Programme 2022/23 and Retreat West’s upcoming First Chapter Prize 2024. In 2022 he developed and taught Jericho Writers’ How To Write a Non-Fiction Proposal course, and in 2023 he was elected treasurer of the Association of Authors’ Agents.
Dr Kadian Pow is a Lecturer in Sociology and Black Studies at Birmingham City University. As an Expert Consultant in Cultural Trends at Canvas8, Kadian has worked on racial equity projects with Beatfreeks, and Museums in the UK and USA. She is the author of Stories of Black Female Identity in the Making: Queering the Love in Blackness (2023).
Eligibility
To enter the Fellowship, all entrants must:
- Be of Black African or African Caribbean heritage
- Be over 18 and living in the UK
- Not have a publishing contract or agent for the proposed work
The Fellowship
The successful recipient(s) of the Fellowship will receive a package of creative support throughout 2025. This will include:
Editorial support and mentorship:
- A bespoke mentoring programme offering industry-standard creative support (and unique insight into working with a publisher). This will be managed by Writers & Artists and Bloomsbury, and will include milestone editorial meetings throughout the year. (Mentor to be appointed based on the Fellowship recipient’s field of work, career history and aspirations, as well as shared experiences and challenges). A typical one-year mentoring programme includes four milestone meetings of one-hour between mentor and mentee. Submission deadlines will be agreed before each of these sessions, with mentees expected to submit a tranche of original writing (to an agreed word count) in advance so that their mentor can prepare accordingly. Each one-hour meeting will be used to discuss progress, editorial suggestions and next steps. Mentors will offer a short follow-up report outlining everything discussed within the session. Where possible, we will encourage that at least one of the milestone meetings takes place in-person at Bloomsbury Publishing.
Financial support:
- The Fellowship will offer £1,000 in financial support to the recipient at the start of the fellowship year
Events and networking opportunities:
- Registration to a UK-based academic conference attended by Bloomsbury in 2025
- A complimentary place on Writing Non-Fiction, a five-week online course from Writers & Artists
- A complimentary place at any appropriate Writers & Artists events taking place in 2025
- An invitation to attend all appropriate relevant Bloomsbury Academic author events
- Invitations to participate in any relevant Bloomsbury Academic fellowship panels, recordings or events
- The option of a thirty-minute one-to-one consultation with a literary agent, who will provide proposal feedback and marketplace insight
Resources:
- Full access to Writers’ & Artists’ online listings: a one-year subscription to a database of thousands of industry contacts
- £250 of Bloomsbury Academic titles
The end goal of this invaluable, industry-standard package of support is that the author feels in a position to begin approaching prospective publishers.
Full entry details
To apply for the Fellowship, all entrants must:
- Provide a short statement (maximum 200 words) about how their work aims to educate and inspire one of the following UN Sustainable Development Goals or a key thematic topic from across the Humanities and Social Sciences such as: Gender and sexuality; Economics and international development; Social welfare, society and communities; Politics, current affairs and government; Equality and diversity; Climate and environment; History and cultural heritage; Popular culture and media; Literary studies
- Provide a provisional Table of Contents and projected word count
- Provide a 200-word synopsis of the work
- Upload a 1,000-1,500 word sample extract of the work
- Have an account with writersandartists.co.uk, which is free to create
- Submit their entry via our online form
You do require an internet connection to submit your competition entry; however if you have any questions or specific accessibility queries, please do contact us at academicfellowship@bloomsbury.com.