Creative Writing academic has been shortlisted for the Aurora Metro Virginia Prize for Fiction

Emily Bullock, OU Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing, Media Fellow for FASS, and Associate Lecturer on A363, has been shortlisted for the Aurora Metro Virginia Prize for Fiction with her manuscript: For Always Only. Emily also completed her PhD in Creative Writing at The Open University.

The Virginia Prize for Fiction is a biennial novel competition which has been established for over a decade. The name of the contest pays tribute to local author Virginia Woolf. The competition is open to women and non-binary writers of any nationality from any country, aged 18 and over. Previous prize winning novels have been adapted for radio and TV. From the shortlist of four, a winning manuscript will be announced in Autumn 2026 and published in 2027.

For Always Only is about Issy, stuck in a bedsit in Bloomsbury trying to read Finnegans Wake. As life unravels around her, the need to read begins to consume her. She's been trying to finish the book since she was ten years old, since the night her mother left. Now, during the first COVID-19 lockdown, isolating in her room, disturbed only by a nosy neighbour and an angry cat, she gives herself seventeen days to finish the seventeen chapters. But each turning of the page reveals more about the lies that hold her life together as her past creeps out between the lines.