Winning recipient of the 2025 Fugere Book Prize for Finely Crafted Novellas
I have vivid memories of being read to as a child, and the moment I could form letters my mother said I wrote a very long story (phonetically spelled in red crayon) about the adventures of a fearless cat and a dog duo.
I began writing a daily journal as a teenager and have a cupboard crammed with hardback notebooks that I dip into now and again when I need a laugh.
After studying English Literature and Education at London and Cambridge universities, I went to teach English Language and Literature with Voluntary Service Overseas in a small town in southern Tanzania. It was here I began to write in earnest: a very detailed daily journal, letters home and heaps of fervent poems. Living in Tanzania was a powerfully formative experience which has given me a love of music, dancing, card games and being outside in moonlight. It also resulted in a lasting antipathy to television, supermarkets, inequality and electric light.
I taught English Literature at a college in UK for a couple of years and then flew out to Mozambique with a small sum of money and a friend’s vague assurances that I’d be able to find work in Maputo. Fortunately, this proved to be true. I spent fourteen years teaching English Language and Literature with the university and the British Council. Once I’d grasped Portuguese, I also worked as a Portuguese/English translator for the UN and various government ministries.
Creating subtitles for Mozambican film company, Promarte, gave me the idea of writing my own filmscripts, three of which were shot in Mozambique and South Africa. All of these films deal with social issues such as the plight of widows and the stigmatisation of AIDs sufferers. Another Man’s Garden (2007) explores the terrible obstacles preventing Mozambican girls and women from completing their education. This film won four international film awards including the Pan African Award for Best Film at the Cannes Pan-African Film Festival.
On my return to Dorset, UK, I set up a creative writing company so I could work flexibly around my five-year-old daughter, Stella, and provide myself with a community of people who liked writing and discussing fiction. For the past seventeen years I’ve thoroughly enjoyed working with small groups of adults and individual authors in Britain and Italy.
Writing the guidebook Lesser-Known Lyme Regis (2014) was a great educational experience, though sticking to the facts was an awful strain. I’m much happier making things up, and in recent years I’ve enjoyed writing another filmscript set in Maputo, countless flash fictions, a few poems, mildly fictionalised memoir pieces and a novella-in-flash. I’m promiscuous where genres are concerned, but I’m always drawn to pared-back, intense forms that focus on the particular universe of a single person.
A poem of mine, “Landing in Maputo,” was runner-up in the 2019 McLellan poetry prize; a memoir piece, “AK47” (about being shot at for driving the wrong way down a one-way street) was shortlisted for the 2019 Wasafiri Life Writing Prize, and a travel article about African zoos was published in The Guardian. In 2020, I won the Mslexia magazine Flash Fiction Competition with Blue Hills Yonder. My novella-in-flash, The Lady of Situations, about a woman recovering from grief after the disappearance of her closest friend, won the Fugere Book Prize for Finely Crafted Novellas in 2025 and will be published by Regal House Publishing.
When I’m not writing or reading, I like walking (along streets at night, through woods, along the coast path), dancing with my very uninhibited dance group, painting, being a fangirl for my daughter’s R&B group FLO, and sitting in the luminous silence I find at the Quaker meeting house.
Regal House Publishing is proud to bring you Joanna Will’s The Lady of Situations in 2027.
