Atkins, MacLeod Win 2016 Eccles British Library Writer in Resident Award

The Eccles Centre at the British Library announced that William Atkins, author and editor, and Alison MacLeod, novelist and short story writer, are the joint winners of the 2016 Eccles British Library Writer in Residence Award.

Established five years ago, the Eccles British Library Writer in Residence Award was set up as a way to promote awareness of the British Library collections relating to the U.S. and Canada and to help facilitate the use of these collections. Each of the winners is awarded £20,000 and will use the British Library’s collections to research their upcoming publications during their residency which starts in January 2016.  

Atkins, whose first book The Moor served as "a travel narrative and cultural history about the English moors," will be researching a new travel narrative interrogating the Western concept of the desert through a series of journeys around the world. 

For her part, Unexploded author MacLeod is writing a novel inspired by "the events of the 1960 trial of Penguin Books in which the publisher famously found itself in court for its decision to publish the unexpurgated Lady Chatterley's Lover", according to the press release.