The programme, a partnership between the Genesis Foundation and the Jewish Literary Foundation, offers bursaries, mentoring, peer support and an event at London’s longest-running literary festival Jewish Book Week to the 10 successful applicants. Now in its fifth year, the programme is open to all UK residents over 18 years of age with no more than three years’ experience of being published. You can watch a short film about the programme here.
Poetry
In her debut pamphlet, Gemma Barnett explores the correlations between motherhood and dependency by excavating a generations-deep battle with mental illness and addiction. An investigatory undercurrent brings the history of the renovated asylums of the 1960s (specifically High Royds Hospital where her nana was admitted during pregnancy) to enlighten the changing face of the UK’s abortion law with wit and honesty. Reaching through dehumanising structures that criminalise mental illness and compromise the autonomy of those who are caught in their systems, her poetry seeks to play with the theatricality and knottiness of inherited narrative.
Fiction
Christina’s novel-in-progress, ‘Credo,’ is an alternative history with strong Gothic elements, abstracting from the real rise of Puritanism in 16th Century England. Credo unfolds from the perspective of a young midwife, Jane, co-opted into acting as an informer against her fellow woman in a small town, during the wider witch-hunts. At the heart of the story is her marriage to a man she hardly knows, and doubts about the role of God and morality in her life and work.
Fiction
AJ’s novel in progress is titled ‘Between Us Three and the Sea.’ Beloved brothers, Ash and Sinclair, have a seemingly privileged upbringing, but lives are forever changed following an accident on their coastal Highland farm estate. Two decades later, one brother is dead, and the other is estranged, living a nomadic life following release from prison. Can this new life by the sea in Cornwall heal Sinclair, or will revealing his past allow the salt to sting still gaping wounds?
Non-fiction
Scar Tissue is a visceral graphic memoir that tells the story of each of the scars or scarrings on the author’s body. There are twelve in total. The account of each scar is cast as a tightly observed personal narrative informed by the political, cultural and personal legacies that surround us. Collectively, these stories can be read as a roadmap – a guide – and an investigation of the multiple ways in which we navigate the inevitable physical and emotional changes of life.
Fiction
Lia’s literary fiction novel in progress, ‘Catch the Tiger’, is set in South-East London. Rosa, an experienced but exhausted teacher, navigates a conflict between students over the course of one school day, while wrestling with the emotional impact of her recent break up and a damaging experience from her adolescence. The book explores the insidious effects of trauma.
Non-Fiction
Stav’s work of creative nonfiction traces the history of the Lorch family, a Jewish circus dynasty whose artistry earned them international acclaim across Europe and the Americas. Drawing on over a decade of research — including survivor testimonies, family interviews, and archival sources — Stav reconstructs the Lorches’ professional achievements, their family life inside and outside the circus ring, and their fate under the Nazi regime. Interwoven with this biography is Stav’s perspective as a grandchild of Holocaust survivors, reflecting on the challenges of researching, preserving, and sharing such histories, and examining the Lorch family’s legacy through themes of memory, inheritance, and resilience.
Fiction
Irene’s work contrasts Italy’s contemporary loss of young, highly educated citizens due to the scarcity of stable jobs against the period of the Resistance, when their predecessors risked—and often lost—their lives to free the country from dictatorship. The novel follows two women and their parallel stories, one set in the early 1940s in Florence, the other in present-day London. Partly autobiographical, the novel explores themes such as generational disillusionment, the emotional toll of migration, female agency, and the evolving concept of civic duty, thus transcending Italy’s borders.
Poetry
Catherine’s developing collection engages with nuances of the human psyche, familial relationship and how we forge our own relationship with the place we call home following our origins. Exploring the secrets held inside the walls and in the recesses of the places we call home, this collection looks to lean into the built structures and find the voices trapped within.
Poetry
Chloe is working on a debut poetry collection which reimagines the story of Joseph from Genesis 37-50. The poems contain shades of various historical Josephs including Franz Kafka’s doomed Josef K and Sigmund Freud’s collaborator Josef Breuer dialoguing with original hysterical Jewish woman Anna O.
Non-Fiction
Birth Rites blends memoir, biography and social history to trace an embodied history of women’s lives, with a focus on working-class women and the archival gaps that obstruct our understanding of their experiences. Inspired by a momentous year in her own life, when her great grandmother died shortly before she became a mother, it uses her experience of pregnancy and birth as a lens to examine the limits of empirical and medical knowledge in relation to bodies and selfhood.
