Saraswathi Sukumar is one of the recipients of the 2021-22 Malorie Blackman scholarship for ‘Unheard Voices’. We recently caught up with Saraswathi to find out more about her City Lit experiences, winning the scholarship, and her future ambitions…
City Lit launched the Malorie Blackman ‘Unheard Voices’ Scholarships in 2019. The programme provides three annual awards worth up to £1000 each to fund study within the City Lit Creative Writing department.
The awards seek to support and encourage the creative and professional development of ‘unheard voices’, and can be used to fund courses within the City Lit Creative Writing department. Due to the exceptional year we have had in light of Covid-19 and other world events, City Lit took the decision to offer one additional scholarship for 2021-22.
Last week we announced the four winners of the scholarship programme and we’ll be following their writing adventures this year.
Q: Can you tell us a little bit more about yourself and your writing background?
Stories have always played an important role in my life, both as a means to escape and as a means to connect to different cultures and beliefs. Hiding story-books beneath my study notes, day-dreaming about magical lands and creatures, writing out the words from a borrowed book (so that I’d have my own copy), reading to Little Sister, day-dreaming some more, and Grandfather narrating the adventures of Hanuman The Divine Monkey - these are just a few of the memories from my childhood.
However, words have been one of my greatest challenges - speaking words and writing words. Images were, and still are, far easier to conjure up. Because of my struggle with words, those images remained locked in my head for a long time.
But stories want to be told. They need to be told. They find a way to sneak out. Ten years ago, an idea I had had as a teenager, found its way onto the page. While that particular project now rests in a cupboard, I have been busy working on two other novels - both in the Fantasy genre - and have a plethora of other ideas waiting for their turn to stain the blank page.
Q: What role does writing play in your life, and why is it important to you?
Writing is an escape. Writing is trying to make sense of things that I do not understand. Writing is healing - on days when words (for stories) hide themselves, I journal. But most importantly, writing is community.
The friendships I made with fellow writers from City Lit’s creative writing courses have been a huge blessing. We formed a writers group to continue sharing and providing feedback on each other’s work, and one of the most important lessons I learned is that writing does not have to be a solitary sport.
Q: Who are your favourite writers and what stories have inspired you?
It was Enid Blyton’s The Famous Five series that initially inspired me to become either a writer or a detective. It was fairytales and fantasy stories, such as The Lord of The Rings, The Chronicles of Narnia, Harry Potter and, more recently, Children of Blood and Bone, that helped me to escape into worlds with infinite possibilities. And it was Malorie Blackman’s Noughts and Crosses that left me in tears for months and encouraged me to examine powerful themes in creative ways.
Q: What made you decide to study at City Lit?
In an acting class I attended thirteen years ago, a lady mentioned she had been taking courses at City Lit. Recalling this, some years later, I enrolled on a couple of acting classes at City Lit.
In 2019, as writing became my priority, I decided to explore some of the other courses City Lit had to offer. I came across ‘Starting Your Novel’ run by Vicky Grut and thought this would be the perfect course to give me the tools I needed to refine my writing and keep me accountable. Vicky gave us homework each week, which helped me to create some of the detail in my story and the origins of my world. And, in this class, the piece I submitted for the Malorie Blackman scholarship was born.
Q: What courses have you studied at City Lit and why?
The creative writing courses I have studied at City Lit are ‘Starting Your Novel’ with Vicky Grut and ‘Developing Your Novel’ with Jonathan Barnes. Both courses have provided me with the tools to build my stories and how to critically approach my writing.
In addition, I am currently studying Sanskrit with Rohini Bakshi at City Lit and I hope to inject a bit of Sanskrit into my writings.
Q: What made you decide to apply for the Malorie Blackman scholarship?
Excited by the small possibility that Malorie Blackman - an author I had grown up admiring - might read my work, knowing that continuing my writing studies would help me to further hone my craft, and the need to be more courageous this year, led me to apply for the 2021-22 scholarship. When I found out I had been shortlisted, I burst into tears and I am still in shock at being one of the winners.
The year the Malorie Blackman scholarship was launched I remember thinking, what a brilliant way to provide writers from different backgrounds with the opportunity to study their craft and share their work. This emphasis on diversity was particularly important to me because, growing up, there was a lack of main characters of colour in the fantasy fiction that I read and loved. In my head, I used to replace the main characters with characters that looked like me - a British-Indian girl. It is my wish that one day I will join the growing number of writers who create fantasy fiction that include lead characters from diverse backgrounds and that I will invent worlds inspired by my Indian culture and mythology.
Q: What do you hope to achieve through the scholarship scheme?
My hope is to attend courses on fiction and fantasy fiction writing to help me progress my novels…perhaps even finish a first draft! I look forward to immersing myself in the world of creative writing, to learning and applying new writing techniques to my work, and finally I look forward to meeting other writers and being a part of this wonderful community.
I am immensely grateful to Malorie Blackman and the City Lit Writing Team for giving me this incredible opportunity and I am excited to embark on this next part of my writing journey.
