From Abruzzo to the Alps, Blackpool to Beijing, these thought-provoking, exploratory, and sometimes experimental narratives from the 2025 UEA Prose Fiction MA graduates ask the big questions and leave even bigger ones in their wake. Spanning tales of organ transplants, murder trials, cultural rites of passage, talking tower blocks, malevolent gamekeepers, parasocial relationships, mysterious spa retreats, and lunar crime scenes, these voices enlighten us to the world we inhabit, its past and its possibilities. The six pieces in this year’s collection of UEA Non-Fiction writings take us on a meandering journey. From the culinary delights of gravy to touching interactions with frequenters of an English car boot sale. They lead us through exquisite prose crafted by a savant of ‘gender aliveness’ and on to a searing memoir of a time now gone, wrought from what Maupassant termed ‘the wreckage of the aristocracy’. They include a passionate and refreshingly gentle reminder of why we’d do well to consider a plant-based diet as well as a visceral darkly tense autobiographical piece about the trauma of a transnational custody battle. With forewords by Ali Smith and Hannah Murray, and introductions by Stephanie Bishop and Andrew Kenrick, this anthology showcases some of the finest writing talent emerging today

Ali Smith: Ali Smith was born in 1962 in Inverness. She is a Scottish writer. She studied at the University of Aberdeen and then at Newnham College, Cambridge, for a PhD. She worked as a lecturer at University of Strathclyde until she fell ill with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Following this she became a full-time writer[4] and now writes for The Guardian, The Scotsman, and the Times Literary Supplement. In 2007 she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Smith was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2015 New Year Honours for services to literature. Her short story collection includes: Free Love and Other Stories, The Whole Story and Other Stories, and The First Person and Other Stories. Her novels include: Like, Hotel World, The Accidental, Girl Meets Boy, There But For The, and How to Be Both. She was short listed for the Folio Prize 2015. She won the 2015 Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction for her novel How to be Both.

Hannah Murray: Hannah Murray has spent most of her working life as an actor, starring in E4's Skins and HBO's Game of Thrones. In 2022, she moved to Norwich for the MA in Creative Non-Fiction at UEA. Her first book, The Make-Believe - a memoir about magic and mental health - will be published next year by Hutchinson Heinemann in the UK and Dial Press in the USA. Hannah still lives in Norwich.

Stephanie Bishop: Stephanie Bishop is a widely acclaimed novelist and critic. She is the award-winning author of four novels, The Singing, The Other Side of the World, Man Out Of Time and The Anniversary. She is the recipient of multiple prizes, including The Readings Prize for New Australian Writing, the Literary Fiction Book of the Year Award, the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards (shortlisted), the Christina Stead Prize for fiction (shortlisted) and the Stella Prize (longlisted). In 2006 she was named one of the Sydney Morning Herald’s Best Young Novelists of the Year. She has received fellowships to Yaddo, Tenjinyama Art Studio, Himachal Pradesh University, and Oxford University, where she was a Visiting Scholar at the Centre for Life Writing and holds a PhD from Cambridge University. Bishop’s essays and fiction have appeared in the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, The Monthly and the Sydney Review of Books, among other publications. She is a professor of Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia and is currently working on her fifth novel.

Andrew Kenrick: Andrew Kenrick has previously worked as an archaeologist and an archivist, a games developer and an editor, before returning to academia to study non-fiction and biography. He holds a PhD in Life Writing at the University of East Anglia, where he also teaches biography, publishing and archaeology. He is the founder and editor of Hinterland, a tri-annual magazine dedicated to non-fiction. Andrew is fascinated with the ancient world and is currently writing a biography of the first-century North African king, Juba II of Mauretania. He lives in Norwich with his partner.