Upcoming Hollywood Awards Event
Bedford, Eastern Cape, South Africa author Dorothy de Kok is a winner in the L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future Contest earning her a trip to Hollywood for a week-long master-class workshop, an awards event and her winning story will be published in the international bestselling anthology, L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future Volume 42.
Dorothy de Kok skims author bios with mild suspicion—aware they matter, but quietly convinced they are proof that even the greatest writers have writer’s block when they have to write about themselves … and here we are.
Her own storytelling journey began at twelve, when she attempted her first novel: an earnest and spectacularly terrible fan fiction of Enid Blyton’s Magic Faraway Tree series. She finished it, reread it proudly, then lost it, which is just as well, as it was a threat to great literature.
Since then, Dorothy has collected an unusually broad résumé: high school English teacher, academic editor, safe-house director, real estate agent, and hopeful but horrendous gardener. She has spent years listening to people’s stories—students, clients, and survivors—and those voices sometimes find their way into her fiction.
She now lives in the small Karoo village of Bedford, South Africa, where the power supply is erratic and the potholes are legislated, and where inspiration tends to wander in before the first morning screech of the hadeda. She is also, by her own admission, unofficially blacklisted from owning a library card in several provinces due to her unfortunate habit of becoming emotionally attached to borrowed books and “forgetting” to return them.
“Thickly,” her Writers of the Future entry, explores what happens when the desire to be seen becomes literal—a body horror tale about enhancement, erasure, and the price of visibility in a world that demands women transform themselves to matter. She crafted it in the quiet hours before sunrise, in a South African township setting she knows intimately, hoping to catch something magical before daybreak. This time, the magic stayed.
The Contest, one of the most prestigious writing and illustrating competitions in the world, is currently in its 43rd year and is judged by some of the premier names in speculative fiction.
Following the 1982 release of his internationally acclaimed bestselling science fiction novel, Battlefield Earth, written in celebration of 50 years as a professional writer, L. Ron Hubbard created the Writers of the Future (writersofthefuture.com) in 1983 to provide a means for aspiring writers of speculative fiction to get that much-needed break. Due to the success of the Writers of the Future Contest, the companion Illustrators of the Future Contest was inaugurated five years later.
In the 36 years of the Illustrators of the Future Contest, there have been 418 winners.
The Writers of the Future Award is the genre’s most prestigious award of its kind and has now become the largest, most successful, and demonstrably most influential vehicle for budding creative talent in the world of speculative fiction. Since its inception, the Writers and Illustrators of the Future contests have produced 41 anthology volumes and awarded upwards of $1 million in cash prizes and royalties.
For more information about the Contests, go to www.WritersoftheFuture.com.
The post Bedford Author Wins International Writing Contest appeared first on The Home Of Great South African News.
Upcoming Hollywood Awards Event Bedford, Eastern Cape, South Africa author Dorothy de Kok is a winner in the L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future Contest earning her a trip to Hollywood for a week-long master-class workshop, an awards event and her winning story will be published in the international bestselling anthology, L. Ron Hubbard Presents
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