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The brainchild of award-winning comedian Helen Lederer, Comedy Women in Print (CWIP) launched in 2018 to celebrate and support female comedy writers.
The winners of the two published categories receives a cash prize and the winner of the unpublished novel receives a publishing deal with HarperCollins.
There's never been a better time to be a witty woman…
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Teenager Lizzie Vogel has a new job as a dental assistant. This is not as glamorous as it sounds. At least it means mostly getting away from her alcoholic, nymphomaniacal, novel-writing mother.
But, if Lizzie thinks being independent means sex with her boyfriend (he prefers bird-watching), strict boundaries (her boss keeps using her loo) or self-respect (surely only actual athletes get fungal foot infections?) she's still got a lot more growing up to do.
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Queenie is a twenty-five-year-old Black woman living in south London, straddling Jamaican and British culture whilst slotting neatly into neither. She works at a national newspaper where she's constantly forced to compare herself to her white, middle-class peers, and beg to write about Black Lives Matter. After a messy break up from her long-term white boyfriend, Queenie finds herself seeking comfort in all the wrong places.
As Queenie veers from one regrettable decision to another, she finds herself wondering, What are you doing? Why are you doing it? Who do you want to be? - the questions that every woman today must face in a world that keeps trying to provide the answers for them. A darkly comic and bitingly subversive take on life, love, race and family, Queenie will have you nodding in recognition, crying in solidarity and rooting for this unforgettable character every step of the way. A disarmingly honest, boldly political and truly inclusive tale that will speak to anyone who has gone looking for love and acceptance and found something very different in its place.
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Sara Baume Routine makes Majella's world small but change is about to make it a whole lot bigger.
*Stuff Majella knows*-God doesn't punish men with baldness for wearing ladies' knickers-Banana-flavoured condoms taste the same as nutrition shakes-Not everyone gets a volley of gunshots over their grave as they are being lowered into the ground*Stuff Majella doesn't know*-That she is autistic-Why her ma drinks-Where her da isOther people find Majella odd. She keeps herself to herself, she doesn't like gossip and she isn't interested in knowing her neighbours' business. But suddenly everyone in the small town in Northern Ireland where she grew up wants to know all about hers.
Since her da disappeared during the Troubles, Majella has tried to live a quiet life with her alcoholic mother. She works in the local chip shop , wears the same clothes every day, has the same dinner each night and binge watches Dallas from the safety of her single bed. She has no friends and no boyfriend and Majella thinks things are better that way. But Majella's safe and predictable existence is shattered when her grandmother dies and as much as she wants things to go back to normal, Majella comes to realise that maybe there is more to life. And it might just be that from tragedy comes Majella's one chance at escape.
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The state of being blessed, often referring to a person, usually female, who lives a luxurious lifestyle funded by an older, often married partnerYoung, beautiful and ambitious, Bontle Tau has Johannesburg wrapped around her finger. Her admirers are falling over themselves to pay for her Mercedes, her penthouse, and her Instagrammable holidays. She's come a long way, and it's been far from easy.
Yes, Bontle gets the blues from time to time. The shrink keeps wanting to talk about a past she's put behind her. But what she doesn't think about can't hurt her, can it?
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Tiffy and Leon share a flat. Tiffy and Leon share a bed. Tiffy and Leon have never met... Tiffy Moore needs a cheap flat, and fast. Leon Twomey works nights and needs cash.
Their friends think they're crazy, but it's the perfect solution: Leon occupies the one-bed flat while Tiffy's at work in the day, and she has the run of the place the rest of the time. But with obsessive ex-boyfriends, demanding clients at work, wrongly imprisoned brothers and, of course, the fact that they still haven't met yet, they're about to discover that if you want the perfect home you need to throw the rulebook out the window...
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Nina has her life just as she wants it: a job in a bookstore, an excellent trivia team and a cat named Phil. If she sometimes suspects there might be more to life than reading, she just shrugs and picks up a new book. So when the father she never knew existed dies, leaving behind innumerable sisters, brothers, nieces, and nephews, Nina is horrified.
They all live close by! She'll have to Speak. To. Strangers.
And if that wasn't enough, Tom, her trivia nemesis, has turned out to be cute, funny and interested in getting to know her... It's time for Nina to turn her own fresh page, and find out if real life can ever live up to fiction. .
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'Beware, for I am fearless and therefore powerful.' - Inspired by Mary Shelley's gothic classic Frankenstein, discover this audacious new novel about the bodies we live in and the bodies we desire. As Brexit grips Britain, Ry, a young transgender doctor, is falling in love. The object of their misguided affection: the celebrated AI-specialist, Professor Victor Stein.
Meanwhile, Ron Lord, just divorced and living with his Mum again, is set to make his fortune with a new generation of sex dolls for lonely men everywhere. Ranging from 1816, when nineteen-year-old Mary Shelley pens her radical first novel, to a cryonics facility in present-day Arizona where the dead wait to return to life, Frankissstein shows us how much closer we are to the future than we realise.
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