Miriam Margolyes reads my story!

The most exciting news from last week: I attended the Sense Creative Awards at the Geffyre Museum in London on Thursday. Sense is the UK's leading deafblind charity and the Awards celebrate writing by the deafblind as well as writing about the condition. I was privileged to hear some inspirational pieces written by the most amazing children and adults. Miriam Margolyes read various extracts - and the whole of my shortlisted story, A Shanty for Sawdust and Cotton.

Without exception this was the most thrilling experience of my writing life to date. Miriam is a terrific actress and didn't so much read as perform my story, wonderfully. I had goosebumps as I listened. To hear her announce I was the winner was... just so special. When I thanked her for reading so wonderfully, she said, 'Thank you for writing it so wonderfully,' and my day was complete. Such an amazing award to win, a real honour. I feel blessed.

Sense's PR team are hard at work already, sending a press release to the local media in which they quote Miriam as saying, 'My work is about bringing to life the words on a page. These are powerful words that speak volumes about the very difficult challenges that deafblind people face every day. There’s a compelling quality that draws in the reader and gives voice to these challenges.'

The event was filmed and I've been promised an MP3 audio file of Miriam's reading, which I will post here in due course. For now, colour me very, very happy.