A FORMER Haywood student is making waves in the creative writing world.

Kate Beeden, 35, was recently announced as one of the winners in a national creative writing competition with her entry The Wedding Ring.

The competition, which was advertised in libraries across the UK, was run by The Reading Agency and encouraged would-be authors to submit short stories inspired by the word 'shine'.

She said: "I first saw the competition in my local library where there was a poster advertising it and I thought 'I could do that'.

"After debating how I could interpret the theme 'shine' I decided to use a lost wedding ring as the centre piece of my story and was thrilled to be selected as one of 10 winners.

"The prize was a day in London on a writing workshop with bestselling author Joanna Rees, and I was so excited to be able to learn new techniques and get ideas on how to improve my writing. "

The Wedding Ring was selected from what the organisers described as 'a large volume of entries' and is now available to read on publisher Pan Macmillan's website The Window Seat.

"Since then I have continued to write whenever I can," she said.

"A piece of my writing was chosen to be part of a website for the Off the Shelf Festival – the book and writing festival in my adopted Sheffield – and one of my poems 'Invisible Ribbons' has been selected to be part of an anthology due to be published by Blue Skirt Publications next year .

"Splickety, an American flash fiction magazine, is also publishing my festive short story The Gift in their December edition, so there have been some successes in 2014."

Miss Beeden added that her goal for 2015 is to complete the novel she is currently working on and continue to get her work out there.

Visit facebook.com/kateylovell to find out more.