Sheila Killian was the first prize winner of last year’s BGTW Travel Writing Competition for Unpublished Writers run in partnership with Traveller magazine with her piece ‘Pour Mademoiselle’ . She won a creative writing course in Istanbul run by Travellers’ Tales.

If would like to enter this year’s competition (deadline 31st December 2010), find the details here.

Here is Sheila’s account of her prize experience:

Winning the prize last year really was the best thing that could have happened to my writing. More than a line on my CV, it gave me confidence, and I learned so much on the prize weekend travel writing course in Istanbul. I'd always written: the usual mix of angsty poetry, short stories and unpublished non-fiction, but the intense experience of the writing course changed my whole approach to writing about a place. Transformative is an overused word, but it fits.

I arrived late and apprehensive in Istanbul. The people on the course were great – down-to-earth, focused, supportive and funny. Travellers’ Tales director Jonathon Lorie and Wanderlust Editor Dan Linstead facilitated with a mix of empathy and ambition which pushed us all forward over the two days.

On the first morning, we read some travel pieces aloud, and discussed them before heading out into the heat and bustle of the city. We were right by the Blue Mosque, and a few of us whipped out cameras only to discover the first rule - no pictures. Or rather, no pictures of anything you haven’t first tried to capture in words. It was surprisingly effective advice.

Our first exercise involved getting our impressions of the Grand Bazaar down on paper; the twist was, we had to stay in a tiny area just inside the main entrance. We scattered with our notebooks and pens, scribbling in a panicked way at first, then relaxing, looking, listening. I remember that stretch of marketplace more vividly than most places I’ve visited and photographed. The watchful eyes of vendors as tourists drifted blindly past, the smell of Windolene from the gold shops, the echoing coolness of the high colonnades after the heat outside. OK, we got it: lesson one, on stopping to write in the moment – learned. It was only 11am, but already we'd made progress.

This set the pattern for the weekend. We had more specific exercises: smells, colours, characters, echoes of history, but the practice was the same. We'd stop, and write. And later we’d share our work and give constructive feedback. It's amazing how we all saw the same stretch of stalls so differently, or how the impressions we gathered of, say, a group of schoolgirls in traditional dress could be so varied. We learned not just about what makes a piece work, but to recognise our own styles.

There was lots of advice and mentoring from Dan and Jon on how to write, why to write, how to get published. It was useful and enjoyable. My writing is now more assured and careful. I'm more confident about what I want to write and where it might be published. And yes, I've already sold a citybreak article on Istanbul to a national paper,

So I'd strongly encourage anyone thinking of entering the BGTW competition to go for it. You've nothing to lose but your amateur status!