RSL Brookleaze Grants

The RSL Brookleaze grants programme has now closed and been replaced by our Literature Matters Awards.

Awarded by our Council, the RSL Brookleaze Grants supported writers (novelists, playwrights, poets, short story writers) who needed time away from their normal lives – to take sabbaticals from their jobs, for example, or to travel abroad for research – to write.

Other grants you may be interested in applying for:

• The Author’s Foundation Grants for works in progress
• Arts Council England Grants for the Arts
• The Royal Literary Fund Grants for authors in financial difficulties
• Peggy Ramsey Foundation Grants for theatre writers for works in progress
• Winston Churchill Memorial Trust travelling fellowships

RSL Brookleaze Grant Recipients

Camilla Whitehill (£1000, Autumn 2016)
Commissioned by the Bush Theatre, Camilla is writing In This House That We Have Built. Her RSL Brookleaze Grant enabled her to journey to Ballyvadlea, and to spend a week there, getting to know the place and researching her story.

Chris Monks (£1000, Autumn 2016)
Chris will spend his grant buying time away from teaching to concentrate on his current project, Wainwright in Love, a play with music.

Ben Musgrave (£1,000, Spring 2016)
Ben to traveled to Bangladesh and India to research his new play for Tara Arts, Indigo Giant (working title), planned for production at the new Tara Theatre in 2017.

John O’Donoghue (£1,000, Spring 2016)
John used the grant to spend time in Northampton, researching the poets John Clare and Robert Lowell for his novel, The Palace of Wisdom. ,

Aisha Zia (£1,000 Spring 2016)
The RSL Brookleaze Grant will support Aisha to write and develop her new play Ground (working title) while she is working with award winning theatre company Common Wealth, and Eastern Angles Theatre Company in Peterborough.

Shazea Quraishi, £1250 (Autumn 2015)
Shazea will take time out from teaching and other projects to focus on writing her new poetry collection. Part of this time out includes a week of research and writing at the Museum of Childhood.

Dan Powell, £1250 (Autumn 2015)
Dan will take time from his teaching work in order to focus on the completion of his latest novel and a new short story collection. It will also provide part of the funding for a research trip in support of his novel.

Tom Lee, £2500 (Spring 2015)
Tom will took a six month sabbatical from his job at King’s College London, and complete his second collection of stories, provisionally titled Big Cat.

Afsaneh Gray, a small grant (Spring 2015)
Afsaneh took a week off from work to focus on the play she is currently writing based on the true story of an unlikely friendship between a British bishop in 19th Century colonial South Africa and his Zulu servant, William Ngidi.

Bethan Roberts: £1,500 (Autumn 2014)
Bethan traveled to Tupelo, Mississipi and Memphis, Tennessee to research her latest novel Cilla & Elvis, a fictional recreation of the early life of Elvis Presley.

Benjamin Myers: £1,000 (Autumn 2014)
Benjamin’s last novel, Pig Iron, won the inaugural Gordon Burn Award, which gives him the use of a cottage in the Scottish borders for three months. The Brookleaze Award will enable him to use this time exclusively for writing, without taking on freelance work. He is working on a novel about an 18th-century gang of criminals ‘the Coiners’.

Laline Paull: £2,500 (Spring 2014)
Laline conducted two separate research trips – at dusk and dawn of the Arctic night – for her second commissioned novel, to be published by 4th Estate.

Neil Rollinson (Autumn 2013)
A poet who has decided to move his focus to prose and wanted the time and space to write a collection of short stories.

Debbie Johnson (Spring 2013)
Travelled to New York to research her second novel (published by Del Rey UK an imprint of Random House) a follow-up to her first book set in Liverpool and Dublin