We are committed to discovering new writers in poetry, short story, flash fiction and the novel. Our alumni reads like a Who’s Who of the literary world: Kate Atkinson MBE, Gail Honeyman and Kit de Waal. Judges have included Roger McGough, Monica Ali and Zoe Heller. Our patron is Fay Weldon. We are a route to being published so send us your words and it could be your name up here next year.
I have enormously fond memories of the Bridport Prize. It gave me one of the first affirmations that I could write. The story I wrote for the competition was the first time I felt I found that elusive thing – my ‘voice’. Without the Bridport Prize I would probably not have found my agent and quite possibly wouldn’t have written Behind the Scenes at the Museum so I have a lot to be thankful to it for.
Robert McCrum is a writer and editor whose most recent book, Every Third Thought: On Life, Death and the Endgame, was published in 2017. From 1980 - 1996, McCrum was editor-in-chief of Faber & Faber. He was Literary Editor of the Observer from 1996 - 2010 and appointed Associate Editor in 2008.
Raymond Antrobus was born in Hackney, London to an English mother and Jamaican father. He is the author of Shapes & Disfigurements, To Sweeten Bitter and The Perseverance. In 2019 he became the first ever poet to be awarded the Rathbone Folio Prize for best work of literature in any genre.
Victoria Hislop read English at Oxford, worked in publishing, PR and as a journalist before becoming a novelist. Her first novel, The Island, held the number one slot in the Sunday Times paperback charts for eight consecutive weeks and has sold over two million copies worldwide.
