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- BIOGRAPHY
- Chris Firth was born in Girlington, Bradford. He grew up in the Heaton and Manningham areas of Bradford, attending Lilycroft, Frizinghall and Belle Vue Schools. He studied English and Creative Writing in Sheffield (working with Barry Hines as his creative writing tutor).
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- After graduating in 1985, he was awarded a Yorkshire Arts Young Writers Award for a sample collection of short stories. These stories were later published in Northern Short Stories 1, Leeds Other Paper, Telegraph and Argus Newspaper (Bradford), and various small press magazines.
- In the mid 80’s Chris lived and taught English in The Republic of Sudan and Barcelona, Spain, and completed a PGCE at the University of Leeds.
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- In 1997 his first novel, Miasma, was published by Springboard. In 2000, a short story collection in progress he had been working on through the late 90’s received an Art Council Writer’s Award. Stories from the collection have been published in a wide variety of short story collections (‘Tubthumping’ – Route; Dream Catcher Magazine; Metropolitan Urban Literary Magazin; Quality Women’s Fiction; Aquarius Women Short Story Collection; .) In 2003 the collection was published as a whole by SINAP – the publishing arm of Skrev-Press, Wales. Also in 2000, Chris was commissioned to collect, write and edit a short story collection for Route publishers, Castleford – the collection was published in 2001 as ‘The Unexpected Pond’. In 2001, Hocus Pocus Hulbabaloo, a short story collection for teenagers, was published as an educational reader by Solomon Press. In 2001 Chris organized the first ‘Whitby Literature Festival’ which saw a range of writers, poets and performers read in Whitby, culminating in a sell out reading at Caedmon School hall by Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion.
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- In 2002 Chris had a comic play, ‘Endeavour – True Story’, performed aboard HMS Bark Endeavour while it was docked in Whitby Harbour, and then for three sell-out nights at a theatre venue in the town. He received an Arts Council Travel and Research award, with which he travelled to Croatia and Bosnia-Herzogovina to research the effects of recent warfare and to work with young writers.
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- In 2003 he was commissioned by Promethean Ltd to produce an eductational CD based around a short story collection ‘The Mulgrave Tales’.
In 2005 Chris was commissioned by Shutter Books to write, collect and edit poetry for a series of high quality, hard backed photography and poetry books – the 'One Nine Nine ' series. To date two books have been produced – the critically acclaimed 'Whitby One Nine Nine' and the forthcoming 'North Yorkshire One Nine Nine'
In Betwwen 2003 and 2006 he has worked on a number of digital story and resource projects, including 'Gruff McDonald Gets Into A Fight' for North Yorkshire Library services and the Justice Restorative Team and 'The Floating World of Tir Na n-Og' interactive whiteboard fantasy game for Cable Educational Ltd.
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- Married and currently living in Whitby, North Yorkshire, Chris has two sons, Joe and Jacob.
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