November 2021: Recipient 015, Polly Manning
We’re well into the second year of The Working Class Writers Grant now and we are thrilled to announce Recipient #015 is Polly Manning. Polly sent us two texts that both got me right in the gut in different painful ways. One was a quick, sharp stab and a gasp; the other was an uncomfortable hug from the behind that got tighter and tighter until I felt sad and sick. Acute, emotional, affecting and bleak. I read both texts back to back and I immediately wanted to read more - and that’s how I knew we’d found our next recipient.
Bio:
Polly Manning is a Welsh writer, and currently lives in the upper Swansea Valley in south Wales. Whilst she has worked in screenwriting and film direction, her main interest is in prose fiction - in particular, the short story. Her stories focus on life in rural and de-industrialised parts of Wales, with a particular interest in the ways in which young people find subversive meaning within these often ‘bleak’ realities. She is disinterested in the sentimental depiction of Wales as a mystical, Celtic wilderness detached from the miseries of capitalist neoliberalism, preferring to write stories about the people that actually live there. She is a Welsh-speaker, and currently working on a collection of short stories.
Links below if you want to read her work: