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MILES JOHNSON

22-year-old Miles, still a student at Edinburgh Uni, has already received such accolades as the Herald Scottish Student Feature Writer & Editor of the Year, and the Allen Wright Memorial Award for Journalists under 30 writing on the Edinburgh Festival - the youngest ever recipient.

Not even out of university, and already he writes for the Guardian, Scotsman and Dazed & Confused, to name but a few. He's presently working on his first novel, has appeared on University Challenge, and has imminent plans to set up another student paper and develop a human rights project. It all started, as is so often the case, on the good old uni paper.

Armed with a natural flair for the written word, Miles' fortuitous, innocent flirt with student media provided the springboard to the fully-blazed passion he now nurtures.

"I believe in what Woody Allen said," he shrugs. "80 percent of success is showing up. I think the most important thing I realised was that in print media it's not always important who you are but how you write, and that's quite liberating really."

Ranging from music to theatre, literature to politics, Miles' work is richly-layered and informative. Consistently getting to the crux of taboo or more controversial affairs, his thoughts are well-informed and developed, maintaining the essential ability to engage a reader in a form that's simple to understand.

His diverse portfolio of interviewees includes The Independent's Middle East correspondent, Robert Fisk, and Taner Akcam - the professor forced from Turkey for his studies on the Armenian Genocide, an episode that the European Union demands that Turkey acknowledge as a condition for accession, yet one so controversial that the Turkish State still denies it.

Now, with short stories already commissioned and a novel on the go, can his journalistic experiences thus far help lend his creative writing more flair?

Miles personally believes that the worlds of journalism and fiction conflict, but stylistically at least, reckons that a journalistic background can inform the way a person writes: "I think with people like Hemmingway you can obviously tell how much his background as a reporter influenced his style."

On the subjects of his book, the new student newspaper and the hint of a human rights journalism project glimmering on the horizon, Miles remains tight-lipped. But one thing he makes clear is that it's as much about his own personal achievement as it is to get something published: "I would much rather write something I am genuinely happy with that got rejected, than something rubbish that got published."

And where he hopes these plans will lead him, Miles currently has one main concern - just to keep writing, keep getting better, and hope for the best.

"In the short-term I'd be happy to get a staff job when I graduate and not have to rely on freelancing. From my experience it's a hand-to-mouth existence. But in the long-term I want to concentrate on getting better. Hopefully the more writing I do, the more work I put in, the more I'll improve and the more I'll learn."

CONTACTS

www.miles-johnson.com
milesjohnson@hotmail.com

Judge: Nick Carson, editor, TEN4 Magazine.
Text: Katy Georgiou
Photography: Jannica Honey

Miles was one of 20 4Talent Award winners in 2007, our hotly tipped young creatives to watch, to hire and to collaborate with. To meet the other 19 click here