'Home'
The MinK2025 Prizewinners Ceremony and Anthology Launch

Thursday 10 April 2025
6.30 - 7.15pm; Free/donations welcomed

The Pavilion, The Parks Trust,
1300 Silbury Blvd, Campbell Park MK9 4AD

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Celebrate the winners of our 2025 Creative Writing Competition as author Michael Stewart awards the prizes and introduces readings by the winning writers. During the evening, we will launch MinK#5: Home, our latest anthology of the best local writing.

 

For this year’s competition, MK Lit Fest adopted the theme of Home. 

 

The theme was chosen as a simple word that embraces so many associations and human responses. Home can be a literal thing - a personal address, somewhere more than just a place to live. It can be something you make or remake, and equally something that you leave or lose. This year’s writers – in poetry, flash fiction and creative non-fiction – have been bold and original in their interpretations.

For many of our writers, home was clearly rooted in memory or in memories. Even setting the prompt in English led to multiple entries with the Welsh title hiraeth, a word that invokes a deep yearning that typically cannot be fulfilled. For many, home evoked a time or place shared with the departed: The Grim Reaper lurked in many margins. In an era where migration is rarely from our newsfeeds, there were stories of homes being adopted. And there were tales of homes being literally made, or at least decorated; of the birth of children and the hope that parenthood offers a protective home. There were stories that knew home can be something that time can see us grow out of, beyond, or away from.

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Home may be complicated, but if there was consensus among our writers, it was that home is somewhere that we feel a sense of belonging. Until, of course, we don’t.

​MinK #5: Home will be available to purchase in print and e-book from Thursday 10 April  as soon as the winners have been announced! ​

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