Litro Represents: Maia Jenkins

Maia Jenkins
Winner of the GQ Short Story Prize, 2013

24 year old, Maia Jenkins is a London based writer. She grew up in Singapore and France but moved back to the UK in 2009. She holds an MA in Modern Literature at University College London and is now working on a novel. Whilst reading for a BA at King’s College London, she was a founding member of the literary society journal ‘Of Cabbages and King’s’. While at university she received the Henry Neville Gladstone prize and the Sambrook Exhibition. In October 2013 she won the GQ Norman Mailer Student Writing Prize and will be published in a forthcoming issue of GQ. She was awarded the prize at a Gala Dinner in New York at the Norman Mailer Center, during which a lifetime achievement award was presented to Maya Angelou with a crowd featuring Gay Talese, Tony Bennett, Samuel Delany and Calvin Klein. Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Junot Diaz, best known for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, was honoured, as was the late journalist Michael Hastings (the writer behind the extraordinary Rolling Stone profile The Runaway General.) The GQ award recognised a new writer, Maia Jenkins, for her piece To the Weakness of Others, which will be published in a forthcoming issue.

Jonathan Heaf, GQ Features Director, said of the winning entrant:

“This year the judges were unanimous – Maia’s winning entry To The Weakness Of Others is an exceptional, luminous piece of writing showing not only a maturity beyond her 24 years but also a true talent for the art of observation. She fully deserves the recognition she received last night in New York and I for one can’t wait to read what she writes next. A unique find.”

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