Cover designed by yours truly with the help of Wordle and fellow writer Doreen Porter.

Online writing group Writers Abroad are proud to announce the publication on Wednesday 24^th October of their new anthology, entitled Foreign Encounters.

An encounter can be a chance meeting, a planned get-together or even a confrontation. This collection of stories, non-fiction articles and poems features a variety of foreign encounters: with family, friends, lovers, animals, cultures, or just with one’s own prejudices and preconceptions.

Foreign Encounters is the third anthology published by Writers Abroad, an online group of ex-pat writers.  All the contributors are, or have been, ex-pats living in places around the globe. Author Julia Gregson, a former ex-pat whose bestselling novel East of the Sun won the Prince Maurice Prize for romantic fiction, has written the foreword.

Following a call for submissions, Writers Abroad received 231 contributions of which they selected 95 for the anthology. They include 16 poems, 38 short stories and 41 non-fiction articles. Since Writers Abroad is a virtual writers’ group, all the work to produce Foreign Encounters has been done online.

All proceeds from the sale of this book will go to Books Abroad, a charity which coordinates the donation of free books for schools throughout the world, believing that education is a crucial aspect of human progress. The charity celebrates its 30^th anniversary this year and has supplied over 1,600 schools with desperately-needed books.

Foreign Encounters is available from Lulu, price €9.99 (approximately £8.00), from Wednesday 24^th October, when this link will become live: Lulu

To find out more and for a complete list of contributions and authors, please go to the Writers Abroad website.

Notes for editors

Writers Abroad was founded in 2009. It provides an online forum for ex-pat writers to exchange ideas, views and news on writing and to offer support and constructive feedback on each other’s work. Membership numbers are limited but ex-pat writers may apply to join if they are able to support the group’s initiatives and aims.

• For more about author Julia Gregson, visit her website.
• For more about Books Abroad, visit their website.
  
• Contributors live in, and have written about, more than 50 countries across every continent.

Press release by dear virtual friend and fellow writer, Vanessa Couchman