On Saturday 5 July, we celebrated the achievements of the 2024/25 Folio Academy Mentorship recipients at a showcase event hosted by the London Library.
This was the eighth year of First Story’s partnership with Folio Academy and The Writers’ Prize, enabling us to offer year-long one-to-one creative writing mentoring to four First Story alumni dedicated to furthering their writing practice.
During the showcase, we enjoyed an impressive range of readings, from poetry to crime novel to short story. Each of the mentees read with confidence and flair to an audience of friends, family, teachers, and staff and supporters from First Story, Folio Academy and the London Library.
This year, Malu from Holland Park School was paired with multi-award-winning poet and playwright, Caroline Bird; novelist, poet and Rough Trade Books editor, Will Burns, was paired with Rose from Orion Eden Park (formerly Eden Park High School); Zaynab from St Paul’s Way School was paired with multi-award-winning novelist and playwright, Guy Gunaratne; and Shah from George Green’s School was paired with T.S. Eliot Prize-winning author, Joelle Taylor.
We are always so excited to see the calibre of the mentors selected by Folio Academy and are continually blown away by the talent and commitment of the First Story alumni who embark on this invaluable creative journey.
The mentorship scheme is a highly sought after progression route for our young writers, and we are hugely grateful to Folio Academy and The Writers’ Prize for their continued partnership.
The mentorship allowed me to realise how important it is to write and to share your writing, how impactful words can be, which made me so much more confident than before regarding the value of my writing and more comfortable with sharing my words.
The influence of the mentorship has enabled me to see the importance of writing, and how a serious pursuit of it is tangible, and now I hope to be able to continue writing in a professional, more serious level and reach more people.
I loved the fact that I was paired with an author who had experience and expertise in the industry. They showed me how they worked and how to do so as well.
The Folio Academy Mentorships are supported by Amazon Literary Partnership.
London Connect 2025