Laura Theis is an award-winning musician and writer.
She grew up in a place in Germany where each street bears the name of a mythical creature or fairy tale character. Now she lives in the magical city of Oxford with her partner and her scruffy dog Wodehouse.
Writing in her second language, her short stories, songs, radio plays, and poetry
have been broadcast and/or published in the UK, Ireland, Belgium, Germany, Indonesia, Canada and the U.S. Laura has gained a Distinction in the MSt Creative Writing at Oxford University (Keble College) as well as an MA in Theatre Studies, German and American Literature from LMU Munich.
In 2020, she was awarded the £10,000 Mogford Short Story Prize.
Her winning story "The Lift" was selected by the judges Stephen Fry and Prue Leith
out of 1280 worldwide entries. Other accolades for her fiction writing include receiving the AM Heath Prize and the Short Story Prize by Curtis Bausse. She was runner-up for the Mairtin Crawford Award and the Mslexia Flash Fiction Competition, longlisted for the BBC Short Story Award and the Cambridge Prize, and shortlisted in the Frome Festival Short Story Competition. She was also shortlisted for the Bridport Prize for Flash Fiction and Short Story.
For her poetry, she has received the 2021 Oxford Brookes Poetry Prize, the Brian Dempsey Memorial Pamphlet Prize as well as the Hammond House International Literary Award. A finalist for the The Women Poets’ Prize funded by the Rebecca Swift Foundation, and a Forward Prize nominee, she placed in the Margaret Reid Poetry Contest, Hippocrates Prize, Geoff Stevens Memorial Poetry Prize, the Acumen Poetry Competition, the Charroux Prize and the Wirral Poetry Festival Competition among many others. Shortlistings include the Alpine Fellowship, the Blue Nib Chapbook Award, the Yeovil Prize for Poetry, the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award, as well as three consecutive Live Canon International Poetry Awards. Her poetry was also repeatedly longlisted for the National Poetry Competition out of over 18,000 entries.
Her new work appears in POETRY, Asimov's, Mslexia, Rattle, Magma, Strange Horizons, Jellyfish Review, Aesthetica, Abyss & Apex, AE SciFi, The London Reader, Lucent Dreaming, Rise Up Review, Reflex Fiction, harana, Welter and many other places, as well as in several print anthologies.
Her poetry debut, how to extricate yourself, is published by Dempsey&Windle.
It was selected as the winner of the 2020 Brian Dempsey Memorial Prize by the Poetry Society's Paul McGrane, chosen as an Oxford Poetry Library Book of the Month, and nominated for an Elgin Award by the SFPA.
Her second book, A Spotter's Guide For Invisible Things, received an Arthur Welton Award from the Society of Authors, was the winner of the 2022 Live Canon Collection Competition and will be published by Live Canon in 2023.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
(a little selection of some of Laura's favourite things:
tiny bookshops, enchanted forests, dusk, the sea, dog walks, fairy tale cottages, and being in front of microphones...)
tiny bookshops, enchanted forests, dusk, the sea, dog walks, fairy tale cottages, and being in front of microphones...)
