Raymond Williams Prize for Community Publishing 2005

"The Raymond Williams Prize is an award dedicated to commending two published works of outstanding creative and imaginative quality that reflect the life and experiences of the people of particular communities. Open to non-profit-making publishers, and awarded annually, the prize is becoming increasingly popular. It was set up by the Arts Council England in 1989, and is now in its sixteenth year."

The first prize of £3,000: "The Monkey's Typewriter was written to celebrate ten years of Willesden Green Writers' Workshops. It contains eighteen stories and poems that are in turn funny, disturbing, captivating and downright strange."

The runners-up prize of £2,000 was awarded to Equal Arts for The Kitchen Suitcase. "This book is a result of an Equal Arts project which involved women from Zayis Raanon, a Jewish organisation in Gateshead. The women met weekly to make a tapestry on the theme of Journeys to Gateshead with the artist Fiona Rutherford and tell their stories to the poet Gillian Allnutt. Seven very different women give us a glimpse of their lives and community that binds them together."

The judges this year were Debjani Chatterjee, an award-winning South Asian author with over 40 books to her name, Tim Diggles, director of the Federation for Worker Writers and Community Presses, and Courttia Newland, author of three acclaimed novels and co-editor of IC3: The Penguin Book of New Black Writing in Britain.

The standard of entries was high, both in content and production, with books of all shapes and sizes, many amply illustrated, representing a wide variety of community groups from all over Britain.

Ossian