A couple of months ago in this column I announced a call for entries for the Jura Malt Whisky New Writer Retreat, an opportunity for a Times reader who also happened to be a writer to obtain a full month of peace and quiet on (you guess it) the isle of Jura. The island is best known in the book world as the place where George Orwell wrote 1984: you can't blame writers for wanting to partake of the good vibes that clearly drift through the misty air. Writers' retreats for established talents have been going for some while, but this year we here in Books teamed up with the Scottish Book Trust and Jura single malt whisky in sponsoring a place for a new, emerging writer.

Swetha Prakash is the talented writer who has gained this place with her piece Tangled Embroideries. The judges were the author John Burnside, the agent Mic Cheetham, and Marc Lambert of the Scottish Book Trust. It's an interesting business, judging an award such as this one, where it isn't, precisely, the work you're reading now that's up for the prize. We found ourselves discussing not only what we read, but also our sense of whether a writer had legs, as the saying goes.

Our intuition was that Ms Prakash has those. At present she's working with A.L. Kennedy, taking part in Warwick's esteemed MA in Creative Writing, having made a break from the IT industry when she moved from India last year. Tangled Embroideries, while a modern work, has its roots in ancient epic: “I have grown up on the Indian epics - the Ramayana and the Mahabharata,” she tells me, “and these are probably the two most significant influences on my writing. I also used to volunteer for a storytelling organisation in Bangalore and learnt a lot about India's oral storytelling traditions. My engagement with these traditions made me realise how vital stories are to our humanity. As Ursula LeGuin says: ‘There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories'.”

That's the understanding that a real writer needs. What will it be like, however, to write about India on a tiny Scottish island? Ms Prakash is excited; she hopes the distance will give her a certain perspective on her homeland. I'm sure that she's right: and soon, perhaps, we'll see the published result.

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