This series of residencies, running this year during July and August is for writers from anywhere in the UK to develop their own projects within the supportive interdisciplinary environment of Cove Park. This year two novelists have been awarded a residency and are coming for between two weeks and one month. The UK residencies are designed for professional writers in mid-career to give them much needed space and time.

Helen Cross was born and brought up in the village of Newbald in East Yorkshire.  Her first novel, My Summer of Love (Bloomsbury) won a Betty Trask Award and became a BAFTA award-winning feature film. Her short stories have appeared in various magazines and anthologies, including the forthcoming Wolf Girls, an anthology of female werewolf stories.

Helen  writes regularly for BBC Radio 4, and her most recent Afternoon Play, Blue-Eyed Boy, was short-listed for the Innovation Award in the 2012 BBC Radio Drama Awards. Helen is currently in the process of completing her fourth novel, and is working a screen adaptation of her third novel, Spilt Milk, Black Coffee (Bloomsbury) for Rainy Day Films.
In 2004  Helen was awarded an Arts Council International Fellowship to live and work at the Banff Centre in Canada’s Rocky Mountains  In January 2007 she traveled to India to be Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mumbai, and has recently returned from working in Hong Kong  and Hungary with the British Council.  She is a visiting lecturer in the department of  Contemporary Art and Graphic Design at Leeds Metropolitan University.