Two writers named as winners of the SA Hachette Mentoring Program

Writers Dee Ayer and Jessie Byrne have been named as the winners of the second South Australian Hachette Mentoring Program.

Ayer and Byrne will work with Hachette publisher Sophie Hamley to bring their respective manuscripts to publication. Submissions were sought from fiction, nonfiction and YA writers.

Byrne’s manuscript, ‘Angel Port’, is a contemporary literary fiction/crime novel about ‘Nathan Newland, a Melbourne high-flyer who is forced to take a minor contract position in the Victorian coastal town of Angel Port’ and ‘is unprepared for the town’s secrets and he is presented with a choice between safety or tarnished, uncomfortable renewal’.

Ayer’s novel ‘The Syndicate’ is a commercial fiction novel about ‘the beautiful, yet highly self-critical, Isabella Caruso and her work colleagues’ who ‘realise the only thing standing in the way of their dreams is each other’ when the office wins the lotto.  

Hamley said the program exists ‘so that writers who aren’t in Sydney or Melbourne can have a channel into the Australian publishing industry, and also so that we are able to discover great new Australian writing, as has been the case two years in a row now with the entries from the SA Writers Centre’.

Category: Local news