FORMER Holsworthy Community College student, Tanya Shadrick, has been made a Fellow of the Royal Society for Arts (RSA) on the strength of her ‘Wild Patience’ long-distance writing project.

Tanya, 44, took two years to create a mile of writing in public beside the country’s oldest outdoor lido, Pells Pool, in her adopted hometown of Lewes, East Sussex.

The five paper scrolls she wrote on were, at 150ft, as long as the pool — a spectacle Tanya said she designed ‘to draw people close so I could make them stop, and think: When did you feel most wild and free? In body; your mind?’

The work connected far beyond the pool, leading to news features and radio appearances and also earned her a month in Switzerland near lake Geneva as a writer-in-residence at the prestigious Jan Michalski Foundation for Writing and Literature.

The RSA has a mission ‘to enrich society through ideas and action’.

Tanya said her work, which included four years as a hospice lifestory scribe, shares these values.

She works in public spaces to encourage and embolden others to share storied and take their own risks.

Tanya is working this season on the swim diaries of fellow West Country woman Lynne Roper, a wild swimmer from Tavistock who died in August 2016. The book Wild Woman Swimming: A Journal of West Country Waters will be published in September this year.

To find out more about Tanya’s work visit her website www.tanyashadrick.com