The Glasshouse

From writing styles and techniques to finding an agent and publishing work, hear advice from authors Cash Carraway, Paul Ewen and Carmen Marcus as they discuss their experiences of publishing their debuts. Chaired by Words Weekend ambassador and literary agent Karolina Sutton.

Cash Carraway is a playwright, author and spoken word artist from Penge, South East London. Her sell-out one-woman spoken word show Refuge Woman was nominated for ‘Best Innovation’ at the 2018 British Journalism Awards and won Editorial Innovation of the Year at The Drum Media Online Awards 2019. Cash’s book Skint Estate is a hard-hitting, blunt, dignified and brutally revealing debut memoir about impoverishment, loneliness and violence in austerity Britain, and is published by Ebury.

Paul Ewen’s first novel, Francis Plug: How To Be A Public Author (Galley Beggar Press, 2014) was a Book of the Year in the Irish Times, the New Statesman, the Guardian, and the Big Issue. This was followed up in 2018 with Francis Plug: Writer in Residence (Galley Beggar Press). In 2015, Ewen was runner-up in the UK Society of Authors McKitterick Prize, and was longlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize. Francis Plug: Writer in Residence was shortlisted for the 2019 Bollinger Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction.

Carmen Marcus’ debut novel How Saints Die won New Writing North’s Northern Promise Award as a work in progress and was long listed for the Desmond Elliott Prize in 2018. How Saints Die was also selected for Read Regional 2018.

Karolina Sutton is a literary agent at Curtis Brown. She represents a wide-ranging list of fiction and non-fiction clients, from Malala Yousafzai to Margaret Atwood. She started her career as an agent in the Book and Film Departments of an American agency ICM.