A writer charges to their teens with a pen in hand, trying to score something permanent about the implausible self on the impossible earth. In diaries, journals, blogs, sketchbooks, this writer excavates channels of self-discovery me my I me my I. Gradually, painfully, they become so fluent in digging that they seek instead to build. Though, there being so little time to build and so, so many structures to ape, that a writer briefly forgets they are a writer, and fills their hands with books and bricks and baby’s bottles. Soon, they forget why they wrote. Next, then they forget that they wrote. Then they forget.
The Terry Hetherington Prize was created to encourage writers to the realisation that, should they dig further and dig longer, should they take their time in prudent planning and blissful building, that there would be cityscape for such structures to survive in. Over a decade later, the trustees of the Prize under the careful dedication of Aida Birch have ensured that hundreds of writers, at an age when the noise of the world around could have muffled their prose or starched their verse can neither forget their craft, nor their potential for craft.
Cheval 11 is this year’s architecture – the statue in its town centre, standing taller than his legacy, pen in hand, is the poet Terry Hetherington.
This year’s judging panel would urge you to visit ‘The Silver Darlings’ by Katya Johnson and Thomas Tyrell’s ‘Sometimes in Summer’ and ‘Young Tommy’ by Michael Muia. In your second sitting, please enjoy the commended entries ‘The Barren Land’ by Thomas Baker and ‘Tylluan’ by Nathan Munday.
We hope you enjoy your stay and return often.
Glyn Edwards and Rose Widlake
Editors
 
Details of how you can apply for the 2019 Terry Hetherington Prize and submit your work for Cheval 12, can be found here.
Copies of Cheval 11 can be purchased at the following Parthian Books link: