Poet Katie Hale photographed near her home at Keld, near Shap

The Speculative Literature Foundation is pleased to announce that Katie Hale is the winner of the 2021 Gulliver Travel Grant.

Since 2004, the Gulliver Travel Grant has sought to assist writers of speculative literature (in fiction, poetry, drama, or creative nonfiction) in their research.  The grant awards one writer $1000 annually, to be used to cover airfare, lodging, and/or other travel expenses.

Hale’s winning piece is “The Guilting.”

Based in the UK, Katie Hale is an internationally recognized poet and novelist. In 2017, she was selected for Penguin Random House’s inaugural WriteNow mentoring scheme – and since then, her debut novel, My Name is Monster (Canongate, 2019), has been translated into multiple languages, and was shortlisted for the Kitschies Golden Tentacle Award. She is also the author of two poetry collections: Breaking the Surface, and Assembly Instructions, which won the Munster Chapbook Prize in 2019. She is a 2019 MacDowell Fellow and has undertaken Writer in Residence positions internationally, including Gladstone’s Library in Wales, Hawthornden Castle in Scotland, and Passa Porta in Belgium.

In 2021, she won the Palette Poetry Prize, the Prole Laureate Prize, and a Northern Writers’ Award. Her work has been shortlisted for the Desperate Literature, Mslexia, and Manchester Prizes, and has appeared in journals such as Poetry ReviewUnder the RadarJoyland, and The North. In 2021, she was longlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award.

She has also written for theatre and immersive digital performance and has featured on national radio and television, having written commissions for organizations including the BBC, the National Trust, and the Barbican Centre. She regularly runs writing workshops online and in-person, and is currently working on her second novel.