YOUR STORY STARTS HERE...

Now in its 10th year, the Grazia and Women’s Prize for Fiction First Chapter competition could be the first page of your literary career

THEY SAY THAT everyone has a novel in them. And, if you have ever dreamed of getting that novel published, this could be the push you need to make it happen. Our First Chapter competition – in partnership with the Women’s Prize for Fiction – is giving you the chance to kick-start your writing career.

Diana Evans, the award-winning author of Ordinary People, has written the opening paragraph of a story – and we’re challenging you to finish the first chapter. The story can go in any direction you want it to, just keep to between 800 and 1,000 words, and send it to us by 13 March.

The winner will join us at the glittering Women’s Prize for Fiction awards party in London on 3 June, where their talent will be acknowledged in front of the biggest names in literature.

THE STORY SO FAR

Diana Evans has started the story – now it’s up to you to finish the opening chapter.

Caught

If you steal something from another time, they will never find you. That’s what he’d promised. You disappear. You never were or are not yet. You’re transient, like speed, or like the wind. So easily she had stepped into those magical machines with their white coils and sharp rims, believing in the next world, the next moon and the next theft. But one day she was caught, and everything she discovered thereafter destroyed everything she knew about time. It does not move or tick. It is one place, one moment. It is we who are moving. None of this is real.