Current ICE Student, Fran Brosan, won the Florence Staniforth Student Fiction 2023 Prize

Last week, on the 25th May 2023, Fran Brosan won the Florence Staniforth Student Fiction Prize with her short story, Drip Feed.  

The Florence Staniforth Prize is run by the University of Cambridge, Lucy Cavendish College and is for students studying any subject there. Students, every year, are invited to submit a short story of no more than 4000 words on any topic. The short story was reviewed by a panel of judges led by Director of Studies in English, Dr Alex Freer. Also on the panel was Fellow Emerita Dr Isobel Maddison, published authors and creative writing teachers Miranda Doyle and Lizzie Speller, and author and scholar Padma Viswanathan. 

Fran Brosan studied English Literature at the University of Durham and went on to have a career in advertising before starting her own international communications agency, Omobono, which she sold in 2021 to Horizon Capital. She is currently in her second year of the Institute’s Part-time Master’s in Creative Writing after having completed the Undergraduate Diploma in Creative Writing: Advanced Fiction and Writing for Performance. 

Fran said: “I was thrilled to be shortlisted and, having read everyone’s opening paragraphs, was so impressed by them that I had no expectations of winning. But it’s been a huge boost to know that people like what I write. If I hadn’t done the MSt at ICE I would never have had the courage to enter, or indeed the skills to do a good job of it.”     

Fran’s entry, Drip Feed, is a fascinating insight into marriage and how no-one outside of the marriage really understands the full workings of it. 

Fran said, about her short story: “The story (Drip Feed) is about something I have always found fascinating - how you never really know what goes on inside a marriage.  In this case, coercive control.  Rather than setting it in an atmosphere of deprivation I wanted to explore how, even if you are an educated, middle-class woman with a ‘comfortable home and a happy disposition’, you can still feel trapped and can be abused.   And it’s about how things on the outside never look as they feel on the inside, whether that’s a relationship or how you feel personally.” 

We offer our congratulations to Fran and wish to give a special mention to our current Creative Writing students, Lily Laycock and Susan Hatters-Friedman who also made it to the final short-list of five alongside Fran.