Press Release
Fiona Rintoul wins the Sceptre Prize 25/03/2009
Fiona Rintoul has been named as the winner of the the £1500 Sceptre Prize for emerging writers, announced at the Aye Write! literary festival in Glasgow. She wins the award for the extract from her novel Leipzig which the judges described as a confident, compelling piece of writing with a sure grasp of character and place.
Leipzig transports the reader to pre-unification East Germany and follows the interweaving stories of Magda, a German translation student desperate to escape to the West, and Robert, a Scottish post-grad on a study trip.
Fiona Rintoul works as a freelance financial journalist. She trained as a linguist and is a past winner of an IJP British-German Journalists Exchange Bursary. She began writing fiction several years ago and has since had short stories and poetry published in a variety of anthologies and journals. She has been shortlisted for the Fish Short Story Prize, longlisted for the Fish Poetry Prize and was a finalist in the 2007 Mslexia Women’s Poetry Competition. In 2007 she was a runner-up in the Daily Telegraph novel-in-a-year competition and in 2008 she won the Gillian Purvis New Writing Award.
The other shortlistees were Susan Kemp’s Around, Around the Ragged Road and Mary Paulson-Ellis’s The Language of Flowers.