The Gulliver Travel Research Grant

Posted by Colin Harvey Jul 4, 2008

It's a tough life being a writer. In 2000 less than one in seven writers in the UK was able to live on their income, while one in fourteen was living below the poverty line. Sometimes it can be a desperate life.

I'm one of the Managment Committee of the Speculative Literature Foundation, and when the organization was founded four or five years ago, it was decided fairly early on that help should be practical -- you can pick up advice on how to do it in pretty much any internet chat room, but there's a distinct paucity of money in the form of grants for genre writers.

So we decided to make a US$600 grant available for writers needing to travel to research their work, if that work is science-fiction, fantasy, horror, slipstream or magic realism -- any one of the sub-genres covered under that umbreall catch-all 'speculative fiction.'

Click on the link and make your application.

But a couple of words of warning -- do NOT apply via Suite101, but through the SLF. I'll be pretty annoyed if I get any coming through here, and will delete them unread.

Second, treat it as seriously as you treat a job application; put real effort into yourgrant proposal, in terms of telling us why you want to go, when in theory everything you need to research a novel is on the internet.

The deadline, by the way, is September 30th.

Good luck, and I look forward to hearing from you.

Abyssinia

Colin