2017 is our tenth anniversary year, so we decided to look at what you, our community, have achieved over the years – and we were gobsmacked.

Twenty-seven of you have published books in the past five years. That’s people who completed the Creative Writing Course and in some cases the Mentoring Programme. Fifteen of those books appeared or were announced in 2015 and ‘16. Another one of you published a short story in a prestigious collection.

Two of you won awards: Enrico de Agostini’s Dieci Ducati e un Prosciutto (Ten Ducats and a Ham) won the biggest literary tournament in Italy and Redi Tlhabi’s Endings and Beginnings won the Sunday Times Alan Paton Award. Wow!

We would like, though, to pay tribute to all our writers tenacious enough to keep going, especially our mentoring participants, many of whom have doggedly continued writing, and who are now close to finishing their…