AN award-winning young writer is already getting commissions with national agencies as she hopes to tackle the inequalities in arts funding that exist within the north of England.
Elena Barham won the BBC Young Writers’ Award two years ago when she was only 19, with her story Little Acorns - which follows an evacuee in the 1940s who begins dressing in her late father’s clothes to disguise her gender.
Since then things have only improved for the 21-year-old, who has received commissions from the British Library and recently wrote an essay about her upbringing in Barnsley for the human rights organisation English PEN.
“I’ve been wanting to write about my experience for a while now,” Elena told the Chronicle.
“It’s something that’s not talked about a lot in the publishing world and needs to be highlighted.
“So I’m discussing the struggles for writers in areas of the north of England.
“We need a lot more investments in these places, but with these least governments underfunding it’s going to be hard to overcome.
“Even during the 60s we’d have more successful working class writers than we’re seeing now.”
Now in her third year of studying English literature at the University of Sheffield, the young woman from Penistone feels she’s been ‘lucky’ to find such success in the writing world.
She added: “I feel really lucky, it’s still so surreal to have won an award from the BBC.
“It was something that gave me the confidence to go out and look for my first commissions.
“I’ve always been writing, I’ve still got stories saved from when I was four years old.
“I’m absolutely loving my time at university - it’s got me interested in becoming an academic, but I’ll always have that passion for writing.”