Named as England’s first UNESCO City of Literature in 2012, Norwich has been a literary city for about a millennium, and its community of writers continues to thrive. As we near the end of the calendar year, let’s cover (pun-intended) the literary highlights of Norwich and UEA in 2025. 

This year marks the inauguration of the National Centre for Writing’s new City of Literature Award, honouring ‘individuals and organisations making an outstanding contribution to the region’s literary life.’ The shortlisted nominees are, respectively, poets George Szirtes, Lotte L.S., Mai Black, and organisations Poets in the Cellar and The Norfolk Reading Project. Today is your last chance to vote (for free) for the winner via the National Centre for Writing’s website! Also available to view on their website is the shortlist for this year’s East Anglian Book Award, which is supported by UEA’s Faculty of Arts & Humanities.

Meanwhile, back in August of this year, our own UEA was ranked third place behind Oxford and Cambridge Universities for producing award-winning authors in a research survey of academic institutions. Indeed, multiple UEA alumni have published this year: Hanna Thomas Uose completed an MA in Prose Fiction at UEA in 2023 and her debut novel, Who Wants to Live Forever, was published by Brazen / Hachette and was a BBC Radio 2 Book Club pick; bestselling author and UEA Creative Writing MA Alumni Elizabeth Macneal most recently published a short story in the collection The Witching Hour; Jade Cuttle, who completed her MA in Creative Writing: Poetry at UEA in 2019, has since released an album blending spoken-word poetry and folk music and is currently a Cambridge PhD student under the supervision of Robert Macfarlane – in April of this year, Cuttle presented a research essay titled ‘Digging for Words’ live on BBC Radio 3 (available to listen to online at BBC Sounds).

To get a head start on discovering the talents of UEA’s freshest batch of alumni writers, head to the website of Egg Box Publishing to purchase the 2025 anthologies from our MA and BA Creative Writing students.

Photo credit: Alexander Howe