Xcity student Jojo Moyes picks up award for fiction

By Nikki Osman

Ex-City student Jojo Moyes has won the Romantic Novel of the Year award at the Romantic Novelists Association’s Pure Passion Awards, which took place on Monday 7 March in Whitehall.

Moyes, who graduated from City’s MA Newspaper course in 1993, collected the prize for her story ‘The Last Letter from Your Lover’.

Moyes said: “It’s very gratifying to win this award. Writing a book is such an act of faith – to have affirmation that people have really ‘got’ it, and liked it, is all a writer can ask for.”

Moyes has published seven books since becoming a novelist after leaving The Independent where she worked as assistant news editor. She is currently working on her next project, a story set in occupied France in 1916.

“It’s a period of history I knew nothing about and I’m finding the research fascinating.”

Moyes tells XCity how to turn yourself from a journalist to a novelist, in the print edition available from April 2011.