CUMBRIAN author Sarah Hall is in the honours once again with her latest literary work.

Sarah has won the 2012 Edge Hill University Short Story Prize, and also picked up the Readers’ Prize, judged by Edge Hill students, at an awards ceremony at the Free Word Centre, London. She received both prizes – worth £5,000 and £1,000 resepectively – for her first short story collection, The Beautiful Indifference, which was published last November.

The Edge Hill prize is the latest in a long line of accolades for the highly regarded writer. Sarah - born in Cumbria in 1974 - won the 2003 Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Novel, a Society of Authors Betty Trask Award, and a Lakeland Book of the Year prize for her debut book Haweswater.

In 2004, her second novel, The Electric Michelangelo, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Eurasia region), and the Prix Femina Etranger, and was longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction.

Her third effort, The Carhullan Army, hit the nation’s book stores in 2007, won the 2006/07 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, the James Tiptree Jr Award, a Lakeland Book of the Year prize, was shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction, and long-listed for the Dublin IMPAC Award.

Not only that, The Carhullan Army reached The Times 100 Best Books of the Decade. How To Paint A Dead Man, Sarah’s fourth book (2009) was longlisted for the Man Booker prize and won the Portico Prize for Fiction 2010.

Her work has been translated into more than a dozen languages. The disturbing and deeply erotic, The Beautiful Indifference, published by Faber and Faber, confirms Sarah as one of the greatest writers of her generation.

The collection includes Butcher’s Perfume, which was short-listed for the BBC National Short Story Prize in 2010.

Meanwhile, Penrith’s Phoebe Power, whose studying for an English degree at Cambridge, has become the second Cumbrian poet in successive years to win one of the Society of Authors’ prestigious Eric Gregory Awards for young poets.

Barrow-based Kim Moore was a winner last year, and Phoebe is one of seven poets to receive £3,000 each in this year’s awards.