Women writers wanted for funded charity project
A unique author-in-residence project cultivating work by older women needs fresh intellect. Alison Jones spoke to its founder
Where are the poets? Where are the philosophers? Where are the physicists?
Sarah Hosking’s clarion call to intellectual women is prompted by a genuine bafflement at the lack of response from them to her offer of shelter, money and peace in which to work.
In spite of her zealous attempts bringing the existence of Hosking Houses Trust to the attention of those it is intended to benefit, she admits she has been disappointed in the lack of variety in the candidates that have been coming forward.
“If I have another novelist writing an ‘Aga saga’ in middle England I shall scream. They might be very good but we have an awful lot of them.
“We are not just for fiction. We are for science writers, social writers, writers on any subject. Where are the people writing on finance? Where are the astrologers? I don’t get poets and I can’t think why not.
“We are not solemn but we are serious. This is not chick lit stuff.”
Sarah set up the sanctuary for older women writers back in 2001 after being offered a grant to write a book about hospital interiors by the Nuffield Foundation.
“They gave me twice what I asked for. It was absolutely perfect and I thought ‘I will do this for other people’.”
A “mongrel career in the arts” had given her a lifetime’s experience in knowing how to cultivate and nurture artists and writers, and how to winkle out funding to support them.
It also gave her a very clear idea of who she would most like to benefit from her philanthropic scheme.
“Women over 40 with a zonking good idea and a contract for publication, broadcast or performance.”
She took Virginia Woolf’s quote “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction” as a mission statement, though now losing the word fiction might reflect its aims more accurately.
“She outlined that in 1928 and that still holds good today,” says Sarah.
Sarah was also adamant that this opportunity should only be extended to mature women, no matter how unpopular a cause that might be.
“Raising the money for older women of talent and merit is about as popular as raising money for crocodiles’ dental care.
“Certain things are easy to raise money for – hospitals, blind babies, cancer care, little Cotswold churches. Easy as falling off a log.
“But for clever women... dear me, no.”
Pithy sound bites aside, Sarah is cut from the same tenacious cloth as the women who campaigned at Greenham Common or stood defiantly outside coal mines threatened with closure during the 80s. Doing their bit to make a difference.
Sarah re-mortgaged her own house and wrote 2,000 letters, raising £200,000 over 10 years, in order to buy the tiny 18th century workman’s cottage in Clifton Chambers, Warwickshire, next to the church and two doors down from where she herself lives.
The bills are met and a bursary has been set up so the women are funded for however long they stay in residence (between two months and a year at £750 a month).
