Prizes, Publications and Works In Progress

Image shows open books thrown into a casual pile on grass

WRITING PRIZES:

2024: Winner MANSIL Writing Competition:

Winning Entry: Goldless Kintsugi
Click here to read full book of all entries

2014: Winner Breckland Poetry Prize

2012: Winner Hostry Festival Creative Writing Prize

PUBLISHED WRITING:

Business Blog - The Productive Pessimist

Raglan's Streets LGBTQ+ cosy crime seaside setting novel series:
Book 1: Raglan's Streets
Book 2: Noah's Beasts
Book 3: Woman's Will
Book 4: Inconvenient Crossfires
Book 6: Awkward Ambitions
Book 7: City Stripes
Book 8: Secrets Kept
Book 9: Truths Revealed

Also Domestics - Recipes from Raglan's Streets

These books published as Ashley Ford-McAllister

Happiful Magazine, September 2019 - Click here to read the article
Published as Ashley Ford-McAllister

WORKS IN PROGRESS:

Flowers Backstage, Money in the Bank - an explicitly trans, working class re-telling of Radclyffe Hall's Well of Loneliness, where the women hold their own - not just the hand of the "great masculine genius". Set in Scotland, between Glasgow's Buchanan Street and the towerblocks of Easterhouse, Flowers Backstage, Money in the Bank contrasts smooth, successful millionaire entrepreneur Steven Golden with the gritty reality of life in Glasgow's Easterhouse for Seamus, his wife Babs, and their friend and lodger, Wanda. All four are trans, all four have ambition - but what happens when their very different lives intersect?

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Radical Reform - Elect Problems, Get Solutions

After every General Election - literally, immediately after, as newly-elected MPs for various regions are announced by returning officers - there are calls for a "reform of First Past the Post ". The Party of government wants to scrap First Past the Post because they believe it will make it easier for them to win subsequent elections, with larger majorities. Parties experiencing returning an MP to Parliament for the first time want to scrap First Past the Post because they believe it will result in them returning more MPs at future elections. And the losing Party wants to scrap First Past the Post because...well, they don't want to lose again, and demanding a change to the way votes are counted is a lot easier than actually doing the work to become re-electable. A lot of ordinary people in the electorate want to scrap First Past the Post, too, because it just seems fundamentally unfair that larger regions are always more likely to get their preferred candidate elected

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If you've taken a moment to have a look at my publication history , you'll notice that my writing to date has been published under the name Ashley Ford-McAllister (as was my previous blog, that I lost the login details for...) So - why the move to Ash Ford-McAllister? It's a very small change on paper (which it technically isn't - Ashley is still my legal first name) but a huge change on a personal level, and one which reflects a lot. Ash was a name that, at 9yrs old, and with an absolute certainty that the answer to the question of "What do you want to be when you grow up?" was "a man", and a belief that the "change" people kept warning me about would be when I'd get the same genitals as my Dad had (yes, a female puberty came as a hell of a shock. Such a severe and upsetting one, in fact, that I just assumed what was probably severe endometriosis was "just normal girl stuff" - PSA: if you're bleeding for 6+ days, a

The Great British Debt Crisis

On Friday 20th September 2024, it was revealed that the UK’s national debt was equal to the income the UK was able to generate; in short, debt was at 100% of GDP. This last occurred in the 1960s - and resulted in the following decade, the 1970s, being extremely difficult for ordinary people, with standards of living declining sharply across all demographics, something which, inevitably, hit those who were already experiencing poverty the hardest. The 1970s saw a massive loss of manufacturing in Britain - historically, the one sector that had been able to pull Britain through the downturns of economic cycles, because the UK used to be known, and respected for, exceptional quality of its manufactured goods, and many countries around the world were keen to purchase what were considered premium brands from Britain. Manufacturing is also a very forgiving and open sector for employment, with low barriers to en

Ash Ford-McAllister

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