  Rachel Hamilton |
Montegrappa has long been a supporter of writing culture and a source of inspiration to aspiring writers as well as famous authors.
During the first world war, Ernest Hemingway was serving as a war correspondent stationed in Bassano del Grappa, and volunteered as an ambulance driver, bringing wounded soldiers down from the front line on the Monte Grappa mountain, to the hospital in the building next door to the Elmo & Montegrappa pen factory in Bassano del Grappa. It was from there that he wrote his war memoirs and journalistic correspondence and Montegrappa consider him as their first ‘celebrity’ writer.
Since then many famous authors have been users and collectors of Montegrappa pens, the likes of John Dos Passos and more recently Paulo Coelho ,Tony Buzan, Richard Restak, Anthony Horrowitz, Shobha De, Philip Ardagh, Liz Fenwick, Sun Mi Hwang, Fernanda Pivano, Piergiorgio Oddifreddi, Hanif Kureishi and a great many others.
 Malorie Blackman |
In recent years, Montegrappa has been supporting and encouraging new authors through a series of high profile writing competitions. Montegrappa supported a children’s writing competition with the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature in 2010, and the Montegrappa First Fiction competition has run for the past 3 years. The First Fiction writing competition, open to any unpublished adults in the UAE has yielded some spectacular results in recent years. Two of the shortlisted authors from the 2013 competition have now been published. Annabel Kantaria, the winner of the 2013 Montegrappa competition, judged by Luigi Bonomi of literary agency LBA Books, was snapped up in a three book worldwide deal by Harlequin while the runner up Rachel Hamilton was snapped up by Simon & Schuster and has now already published her first children’s novel, ‘The Case of the Exploding Loo’, which has in the last month been shortlisted for 3 independent book awards. The competition ran again in 2014 and saw LBA sign up a number of other authors, all of whom are actively working to get their books published.
In Spring of 2014, Montegrappa participated in the London Book Fair as sponsors of Authors of the Day, and launched a nationwide search for the next big children’s author, open to unpublished adults in the UK. This competition was conducted on a national scale in conjunction with the London Book Fair, LBA Books, publishers Scholastic, and The Independent newspaper. The competition was kicked off by acclaimed author Malorie Blackman at the LBF in April 2014 and featured the famous CBeebies presenter and Booktrust patron, Cerrie Burnell as the head of the judging panel. The competition attracted over 1000 entries (all of whom submitted full manuscripts of their novels).
 Competition launch at LBF 2014 |
The winner as well as the 4 runners up were presented with Montegrappa prizes at a special event at Armorial, luxury stationers at the prestigious Thomas Goode store in Mayfair, London, last month.
Laura Woods, who won the competition, received a Limited Edition Teatro La Fenice pen with her own personalised wax seal, as well as a publishing contract with Scholastic. Since winning the competition, film and television companies have been approaching her agent at LBA Books and they have high hopes in optioning her novel for film or television.
In addition to all of these prizes, Laura has been invited to Italy by Montegrappa to see the historical site where Ernest Hemingway wrote his great works and the Montegrappa pen factory where pens are still, to this day, made by hand by master craftsmen in the same historic building where this tradition has continued for over 100 years.
Montegrappa is persisting in this search for the great writers of tomorrow and will be at the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature again in 2015. The First Fiction writing competition is now open for entries.
https://www.emirateslitfest.com/First-Fiction-2015