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Virago now joins forces with Writing Women - the journal that launched Helen Dunmore, Janice Galloway and Kathleen Jamie, to publish this new annual anthology. In this, the best of new women writers of 1998, the sensuality, the eating, the loving that has always characterised women's writing is combined with a dangerous edginess: the elegant Mrs Beecham convulses with secret pleasure at the hairdressers; barefoot Camilla makes her lover drink her blood; bald Eva, with no eyebrows or palm-prints, has a terrible secret; Dr O serves vodka in a jagged bean tin. Ranging in age from 20 to 50, mainly from the north, these authors fly in the face of the idea that exciting new fiction is the monopoly of young Londoners. Selected from over 3,000 submissions, here are 12 new prose writers and 12 new poets whose work redefines 'women's writing' at the end of the 90s. Published with the help of Northern Arts.