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, 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 2018 Short Story Prize by Curtis Bausse. She was runner-up for the 2021 Mairtin Crawford Award and the 2020 Mslexia Flash Fiction Competition, longlisted for the BBC Short Story Award and the Cambridge Prize, and shortlisted in the Frome Festival Short Story Competition.
For her poetry, she has won the 2021 Oxford Brookes Poetry Prize, the 2020 Brian Dempsey Memorial Pamphlet Prize as well as the Hammond House International Literary Award.
In 2020, she was 'Highly Commended' in both the Geoff Stevens Memorial Poetry Prize and the Acumen Poetry Competition, and runner-up for the Charroux Prize and the Wirral Poetry Festival Competition. Short-listings include the 2021 Alpine Fellowship, the Blue Nib Chapbook Award, the Yeovil Prize for Poetry, as well as three consecutive Live Canon International Poetry Awards. Her poetry was also a finalist for the 2020/2021 National Poetry Competition out of over 18,000 entries.
Her new work appears in POETRY, Asimov's, Mslexia, Rattle, 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.
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(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...)
