2022

Joanne Briggs was a practising barrister for many years, and still has a job in the law. Everything she’s written for a wider audience than herself has been in her work life, until now. She’s always enjoyed using her courtroom lawyer’s toolkit creatively in her spare time, by researching the lives of ordinary people from the past who did extraordinary things. With the encouragement she’s had from her experience in the Bridport Prize, she thinks her second writing project will be something of that kind. Joanne lives in South-East England and is a year-round sea bather.

Sheereen Khan says “I struggle to write. It's like a love affair; the more time together, the more relaxed I become, the more me. If days go by without writing, I start to question if are we right for each other. I doubt. I wonder where we're going. I start again, it's stiff, forced, artificial. With others, I do anything to talk about writing. If you said you're painting your bathroom blue, I'd bring it back to writing saying something about the difficulty of describing colours or any drivel just so writing is the topic. We do this when in love.”

Patricia Debney's memoir charts her experiences of intrafamilial Child Sexual Abuse. Her first collection of prose poems, How to Be a Dragonfly (2005), was the overall winner of the 2004 Poetry Business Book & Pamphlet Competition, and her second, Littoral (2013), became a response to her young son’s diagnosis of Type 1 Diabetes. Her chapbook (Gestation, 2014) and her third collection Baby (2016) address dementia and mental illness. She has taught creative writing for 30 years across all ages and stages, and is currently a tutor for Cambridge University. Twitter/Instagram: @patriciadebney, website https://patriciadebney.com/

Caroline Litman trained as a doctor at Cardiff University, later specialising in psychiatry. In 2005, unable to resolve the internal conflict between her career and motherhood, she left medicine. She took an Open University creative writing diploma which she found engrossing. Despite the peace and pleasure writing brought, she stopped writing soon after. The responsibilities of three children, a husband and various pets took priority. Instead, she trained to teach Pilates. She started writing again after promising her youngest child, who died in May 2022, that she’d be who she wanted to be, now that Alice no longer could.

S.B. Long is a Professor of Writing at a public university in the heart of Appalachia. She graduated with a BA in Journalism, an MA in Creative Writing, and a PhD in Rhetoric. Her first book, which was nominated for the Bram Stoker Award, is the true crime account of a murderess in 1890 thought to be Jack the Ripper. She is currently working on her second book of creative nonfiction that details the Killing Rock Massacre of 1895 and her first crime novel set in Kentucky. Blood, Bone, Breath, Earth is her first memoir.

Chaun Ballard is a poetry faculty member in Alaska Pacific University’s Low-Residency MFA Program, a doctoral student of poetry at University of Nebraska-Lincoln, an affiliate editor for Alaska Quarterly Review, an assistant poetry editor for Terrain.org, and a graduate of the MFA Program at the University of Alaska Anchorage. Chaun Ballard’s chapbook, Flight, won the 2018 Sunken Garden Poetry Prize published by Tupelo Press. His poems have appeared in Narrative Magazine, New York Quarterly, The New York Times, Terrain.org and Tupelo Quarterly amongst others. His work has received nominations for Best New Poets, Best of the Net, and Pushcart Prizes.

Roberta Beary writes to connect with the silenced, to let them know they are heard. Their first poetry collection, The Unworn Necklace, was selected as a Poetry Society of America finalist. Their prose poem chapbook, Deflection, won a Haiku Society of America book award and was a finalist for the Touchstone and Eric Hoffer awards. Their forthcoming second collection, Carousel, won the Snapshot Press book award. Their words appear in Rattle, The New York Times, Best Microfiction, Best Small Fictions, and other publications. Born in New York City, they divide their time between the USA and the west of Ireland.

Damen O’Brien is a multi-award-winning Australian poet. His prizes include The Moth Poetry Prize, the Newcastle Poetry Prize, the Peter Porter Poetry Prize, the Welsh International Poetry Competition, the Cafe Writer's Poetry Competition and the Magma Judge's prize. His poems have been published or are forthcoming in many journals including Meanjin, Cordite, Southerly, Overland, Island, Poetry Wales, New Ohio Review, Mississippi Review, Touchstone and New Millennium. Damen's first book of poetry, Animals With Human Voices, was published in 2021 through Recent Work Press. He’s on Twitter at @damen_o

Lance Larsen is the author of five poetry collections, most recently What the Body Knows (Tampa 2018). His poems have appeared in TLS, London Magazine, Poetry Magazine, Paris Review, New York Review of Books, New England Review, and Best American Poetry 2009. His awards include a Pushcart Prize and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He teaches at Brigham Young University and likes to fool around with aphorisms: “When climbing a new mountain, wear old shoes.” In 2017 he completed a five-year appointment as Utah’s poet laureate.

Nicole Adabunu is an MFA Poetry Candidate at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop as an Iowa Arts Fellow. Her work has been published by Writer’s Digest, The Academy of American Poets, a 2022 Anthology selected by former Poet Laureate Billy Collins, and elsewhere. She currently lives and writes in Iowa City.

Freya Bantiff (previously Carter) was the winner of the Canterbury Poet of the Year competition 2021. A member of Hive Poetry, she was longlisted for the Winchester Poetry Prize in 2022, won second prize in the Bedford Poetry Competition 2021, and was the winner of the Walter Swan Poetry Prize (for 18-25) in 2020, alongside the Timothy Corsellis Poetry Prize in 2017. Freya’s poems and stories have been placed in the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award (2021), Mslexia Flash Fiction Competition (2020), the Ilkley Literature Poetry Festival (2010 – 2015) and Foyle Young Poet of the Year (2015).

Janet Dean was brought up in a mining community in South Yorkshire and now lives in York. Following a forty-year career in the public sector, she was awarded an MA in Creative Writing in 2015, after which she co-founded Awakening The Writer Within, running workshops and retreats. Her poetry has been shortlisted in the Bridport Prize (2012), commended in the Poetry Society’s Stanza Poetry Competition and featured in the Northern Poetry Library’s 50th anniversary Poem of the North. As Janet Dean Knight she writes fiction; her first novel The Peacemaker was published in 2019 and launched at York Literature Festival.

Jenny Doughty is originally British but has lived in Maine since 2002. She is a former English teacher, and Education Adviser to Penguin Books UK, where she edited an anthology of pre-20th century poetry Key Poets and wrote two children’s non-fiction books under the name Jenny Green. In the USA, her poems have been featured in Naugatuck River Review, Four Way Review, Fib Review, Hole in the Head Review, and Sin Fronteras among others, and in various anthologies. Her first collection of poetry, Sending Bette Davis to the Plumber, was published by Moon Pie Press in September 2017.

Beatrice Garland is a psychologist who spent her working life in the National Health Service, as clinician, teacher and researcher. She has been a writer for most of her life, publishing both professional texts and poetry. In 2001 she won the National Poetry Competition, and in 2002 the Strokestown International Competition. She has published two books of poetry The Invention of Fireworks, and The Drum, the first of which was short-listed for the Forward Prize for a first collection and is on the verge of completing a third book of poems about early research in the science of immunology.

Nairn Kennedy is a Leeds-based poet whose work has appeared in, amongst others, Orbis, Ink Sweat & Tears, The London Magazine, Stand, The North and Under the Radar. He's been a prize winner in the Ilkley Literature Festival Competition, has been longlisted in the National Poetry Competition, and commended in the Hippocrates Prize, and several others. Other activities he enjoys besides poetry include (occasional) walking in the Yorkshire countryside, gardening and writing computer software. Find him on Twitter @nairnkennedy

Paul Matthews, author of the creative writing sourcebook, Sing Me the Creation (Hawthorn Press), contributes to the 'Storytelling Beyond Words' course at Emerson College in East Sussex where he has been a long-time lecturer and community poet. He travels widely in the UK and elsewhere, giving readings of his poetry and encouraging through playful exercises a love of the written and spoken word. He co-founded the summer school, ‘Poetry OtherWise’. Books of his poetry include Verge (Arc Publications), The Ground that Love Seeks (Five Seasons Press) and This Naked Light (Troubadour). He helps teachers bring imaginative language into their classrooms.

Kate Rutter has been an actor in Film, TV, Theatre and Radio for many years. She has been lucky enough to work with directors such as Mike Leigh and Ken Loach, whose film I, Daniel Blake won the Palme d’Or. Kate is an MA Writing graduate of Sheffield Hallam University. Her poems have been published widely in anthologies and journals such as The Rialto, The North and Magma and she was Highly Commended in the 2021 Poetry Business International Pamphlet Competition. She has been longlisted, shortlisted and this year Highly Commended for The Bridport Prize. Cold water swimming is her only vice.

David Swann has now had eleven successes at the Bridport Prize, whose flash fiction contest he judged in 2013. Last year, his book, Season of Bright Sorrow (Ad Hoc Press), won the Bath Novella-in-Flash Award. This year another novella, The Twisted Wheel, finished runner-up in the same contest, and will be published soon. His other publications include The Privilege of Rain (based on his experiences as a Writer-in-Residence in a prison and shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award). A former newspaper reporter, and toilet cleaner in a legendary Amsterdam night-club, David now teaches at the University of Chichester, and makes fires on his allotment.

Cath Wills lives in beautiful South Devon. She has raised three children and works as a teaching assistant. When she has time, Cath enjoys visiting Iron Age forts and has a fascination with all kinds of archaeology. But poetry comes first when time is spare, and she is inspired by the hidden aspects of us and our surroundings. Having worked a lot with children with special needs she is sympathetic to the voices that feel unheard. She has been writing and studying poetry since she was a child but has only recently felt brave enough to begin submitting her work.

Trent England’s fiction has appeared in print and online in Conjunctions, Hobart, The Masters Review, and more. He has twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and was named a Best Microfiction winner in 2020 for his story “A Quick Word About my Life”, which first premiered at Okay Donkey. His most recent play, Solitaire Suite, had its world premiere in 2021, and he is currently in pre-production for his newest play, Entanglement. He lives with his wife and their son and daughter in Duxbury, Massachusetts, a small, seaside town, where he is also a stay-at-home dad.

P Kearney Byrne’s stories have appeared in The Stinging Fly, The White Review, The Dublin Review, Banshee, Per Contra and other journals in Ireland and the USA. Her awards include the Penguin Ireland/Sunday Business Post, Francis McManus and John McGahern Award. She has twice been long-listed in the Sunday Times Audible competition and was shortlisted in the 2021 White Review short story prize. Phil has an MA in Creative Writing from UCD and is working on a novel assisted by funding from the Arts Council Ireland. She is represented by Judith Murray of Greene and Heaton Literary Agency, London.

Johnny Eugster grew up in Hong Kong and studied Mandarin at London University’s School of Oriental and African Studies. He then became a copywriter working in London and Hong Kong finally opening his own advertising agency in Shanghai. He now lives with his family in Stroud, Gloucestershire. It is here he achieved a major milestone of owning his own tractor. Hardly a day goes by when his Kubota L2850 is not buffed up and swooned over. When not flirting with tractors, he kite surfs, mountain bikes and writes. He is a postgraduate of the MA Creative Writing at Bath Spa University.

Peter Adamson founded New Internationalist magazine in 1970 then became Senior Adviser to UNICEF (1980-1996) with responsibility for its flagship publications including the annual State of the World's Children report. He also wrote and presented BBC television’s annual documentary ‘Global Report’ (1984-1988). From 2000 to 2012 he edited UNICEF’s Report Card on child poverty in rich nations. He has published three novels - Facing out to Sea (Sceptre, 1996), The Tuscan Master (Sceptre, 2000) and The Kennedy Moment (Myriad Editions, 2018). He has also published a non-fiction book (Landmark in Time, 2021).

Abi Curtis is professor of creative writing at York St John University. She is the author of two poetry collections, Unexpected Weather and The Glass Delusion (Salt) and a novel, Water & Glass (Cloud Lodge). She has had stories placed in the Fish Prize and Alpine Fellowship Prize and has been the recipient of an Eric Gregory Award and a Somerset Maugham Award. She regularly collaborates with artists, musicians and scientists and is currently editing a collection of writing on early parenthood for The Emma Press.

Lindsay Gillespie was born in South Wales, and lives in the South Downs. In between she has been a graphic designer and illustrator, lived in Delhi and taught English in Tokyo. She writes short and not-so-short stories and was a Costa 2021 Short Story Award finalist. Story Radio has featured her work on its podcast. She was shortlisted for Oxford Flash Fiction, Fiction Factory and long listed for Exeter Short Story. Her writing has just been published in The Rhys Davies Short Story Award Anthology. She is currently finishing a short story collection about outsiders. Twitter: @LindsGillesp14

Lara Haworth has been published in magazines including Visual Verse, Biography, LAKE, ACME, Nōd and Feels. Her new film, All the People I Hurt with My Wedding, launched on the platform She Does Filmz in April 2021. In October 2021 she was commissioned to write a play, Drowning in a Sea of Love, for Tour de Moon 2022. In February 2022, her poem, The Thames Barrier, was highly commended by Philip Gross in the Café Writers Poetry Competition. Her debut novel, The Straits, is represented by Jo Bell at Bell Lomax Moreton. Monumenta is adapted from her second novel.

Malcolm Heyhoe was born and raised in a small town in Lancashire, and now lives in Nottingham with his wife. He was a racing journalist and flagship tipster for the Sporting Life and Racing Post Weekender. His stories have been longlisted for the Short Fiction Journal, Fish, and Bath International Short Story prizes. He is working on a collection of short stories and recently completed a humorous novel, an ensemble piece, with six main characters, moving quickly, with lots of gregarious dialogue.

Kerry Lyons is a writer, researcher, and PhD candidate at RMIT University, Melbourne. Her story Contrapuntal Motion was shortlisted in the Stringybark Short Story Awards in 2022. She lives in Australia and is the mother of three children, guardian of two cats, and sporadic grower of vegetables. In previous iterations of her life, she has been a photographer and a secondary school English teacher. Her writing occurs in the fleeting gaps between work, study and parenting, a situation which has provoked an enduring love of the short story form.

Damien Murphy lives in Dublin, Ireland with his wife and daughter. His writing has appeared in The Irish Independent, The Big Issue, The Sunday Business Post, and The Dublin Inquirer. He was shortlisted for the RTE Short Story Award. He is currently working on a collection of short stories.

Yseult Ogilvie was born in London but lived in New York until she was ten. She studied Architecture at Oxford Brookes University, and post-grad at The Bartlett, University College London. Several of her short stories have been published in anthologies including The London Magazine, The Macmillan/Scotland on Sunday Short Story Competition collection, and The Mammoth Book of New Erotica. She has written two novels one of which, ‘Redpoint’, was published online by The Pigeonhole. She is currently working on her third novel. She lives in Somerset.

Thomas O’Malley grew up in southeast England and studied English Literature at university. He has had several writing jobs including working as an editor for Marvel Comics and a guidebook author for Lonely Planet. Thomas lived in Beijing for 12 years, staying in the old part of the city and going on occasional rambles along the Great Wall. He is currently in the UK with his family, working as a copywriter and scriptwriter. He thanks Covid, hesitantly, for giving him the excuse to write a short story.

Felicity Pepper lives in Bedford. She is mother to a teenager (biological) and a Shih Tzu (adopted). She studied English Literature at Goldsmiths as a mature student after dropping out of school at seventeen, and now works as an Executive Assistant at a PR agency. In a past life she wrote gig reviews for Artrocker. She has always written stories (and some very bad angst-ridden poetry as a teenager) but has rarely shared her work. She has only entered one writing competition before; she won a book about storms, and it was very exciting (she was 6). Instagram / Twitter: @probablyflick

Hilary Taylor grew up in Suffolk and Hampshire and is a graduate of Edinburgh University. She now lives in Suffolk, where she taught for almost twenty years. Her short fiction has been published in magazines and anthologies and online, and has won prizes in the Bath Short Story Award, Flash500 and Writing Magazine. A previous flash fiction was shortlisted for the Bridport Prize in 2015. Her debut novel, Sea Defences, set on the fragile Norfolk coast, will be published by Lightning Books in January 2023, and she is currently working on a novel inspired by an intriguing family mystery. Twitter: @hilarytaylor00

Jelle Cauwenberghs was born in Belgium and studied English Literature in France. He was a runner-up for the Desperate Literature Short Fiction Prize in 2020 and longlisted in 2022. He was shortlisted for The London Magazine Poetry Prize in 2021. He works as a bookseller in Glasgow while pursuing postgraduate research in modern art, poetry, and translation at Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris.

Goldie Goldbloom is an internationally published writer of fiction and nonfiction. She is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the City of Chicago, the Brown Foundation and Yaddo. Her most recent novel won the French Bookseller's Prize for Fiction (2021) and the National Jewish Library Award (2020). Previously, her novel, The Paperbark Shoe, was placed on the NEA Big Reads list (2018) and won the AWP Novel Award (2011). Her writing has appeared in Ploughshares, the Kenyon Review, on NPR and in Le Monde. She is a single mother of eight and an LGBTQ advocate.

Barbara Diggs is an American writer living in Paris, France. Her fiction has been published in numerous literary journals and appears in the 2021 Bath Flash Fiction Award Anthology. She also writes non-fiction books for middle grade students on topics of race and history. She is currently at work on a historical novella-in-flash.

Helen Irving is a recently retired Australian academic. She lives in Sydney with her husband, but (Covid permitting) spends several months each year in London and elsewhere in the world. She is the author of five non-fiction books and much journalism, but lives a parallel life as a fiction writer, with several unpublished novels and numerous short stories, some of which have been long or shortlisted in competitions. Her only previous award, years ago, was for an ABC five-minute radio story. She does not regard herself otherwise as a miniaturist but is beginning to wonder.

Katie Piper was raised in the UK. She left for the Middle East in her early twenties, and now resides in Northeast Victoria, Australia. Katie is a nurse and a mother. She began to write during maternity leave, first in a tweet size story challenge on Twitter. Her work has since been anthologised by Reflex Press, National Flash Fiction Day, and Rare Swan Press. Katie has also been published by Ellipsis Zine, X-ray literary Mag and The Cabinet of Head. In 2020 Katie was a Pushcart nominee, and in 2021 she was longlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize.

Hannah Retallick is from Anglesey, North Wales. She was home educated and then studied with the Open University, graduating with a first-class BA (Honours) Arts and Humanities (Creative Writing and Music) degree, before passing her Creative Writing MA with distinction. In 2018, Hannah started to send out her short stories on a regular basis. Since then, she has been published in paperbacks, in e-books, and online, as well as placed/shortlisted in several international competitions. She is currently working on a flash fiction collection, a short story collection, a novella, and a novel.
https://www.hannahretallick.co.uk/about

David Swann has now had eleven successes at the Bridport Prize, whose flash fiction contest he judged in 2013. Last year, his book, Season of Bright Sorrow (Ad Hoc Press), won the Bath Novella-in-Flash Award. This year another novella, The Twisted Wheel, finished runner-up in the same contest, and will be published soon. His other publications include The Privilege of Rain (based on his experiences as a Writer-in-Residence in a prison and shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award). A former newspaper reporter, and toilet cleaner in a legendary Amsterdam night-club, David now teaches at the University of Chichester, and makes fires on his allotment.

Zad El Bacha is a writer and community organiser from London. They were one of the winners of the 2019 Spread the Word London Writers Awards with an extract from this novel. They have written on migration, feminism and colonialism for VICE, Red Pepper, The Vision and AZ-magazine. They have written theatre shows preserving oral family histories of war for the Camden People’s Theatre and the North Wall. They were commissioned by Poet in the City and their poetry was published in Bad Betty Press’ Field Notes on Survival and the other side of hope. They are currently writing their first novel.

Tom Brown hopes he isn’t as uninteresting as his name – or bio – would suggest. Raised in the home counties and now living in London, Tom has a degree in Film and a Masters in Creative Writing. Although he plies his trade during the week as a copywriter, his passion for words spills over into evenings and weekends, where he’ll often be found nestled in the corner of the sofa, working on words of his own. The Haven is his first novel, but certainly won't be his last.

Jessica Barnfield works in audio and lives in South London. Originally from the Midlands, she has lived and studied in Paris, Edinburgh and Cambridge. This year she set herself the goal to finish writing Mother, Maiden, Crone, and is happy to say it’s the first new year’s resolution she’s ever managed to keep. An alumnus of the Faber Academy Writing A Novel course, Jess spends her spare time writing, reading, or talking about both in the pub.

Gareth Hewitt lives on the cusp of Lancashire and Merseyside with his wife and two daughters, where he works on his first novel between school runs and a career in healthcare. From ancient sagas to the modern superhero narrative, he finds inspiration in the storytelling traditions of mythology and legend, lending a fantastical element to his literary fiction. His first novel, Snow Moon Flower, won a Northern Writers’ Debut Award in 2021 and made the TLC Pen Factor longlist in 2022. You can find him on Twitter @garhew.

Eileen O’Donoghue is a fiction writer living in the south-west of Ireland. Her short fiction has been longlisted for the Fabula Press short story prize in 2017, shortlisted for the Fish short story competition in 2018, both short listed and highly commended for the Bridport Short Story Prize in 2021 and published in The Quarryman, the literary journal of University College Cork in 2017, 2018 and 2021. Blackwater, her first novel has been highly commended at the Irish Writers Centre Novel Fair 2021 and longlisted for the Peggy-Chapman Andrews first novel award in 2022.

Paul Saville was born and brought up in the Northeast of England. A long-time sponsor of Brain Research UK, he has explored the brain at various levels through the Open University. As a Telecommunication consultant, spending long periods of time abroad, distance learning offered the only opportunity to synthesise work and study. Similarly, Andrew Wille’s online DIY MA in Creative Writing accommodated his untethered lifestyle, and provided the motivation to write his first novel, Amygdala. He now lives in rural Dorset with his wife and sons.

Nicole Adabunu is an MFA Poetry Candidate at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop as an Iowa Arts Fellow. Her work has been published by Writer’s Digest, The Academy of American Poets, a 2022 Anthology selected by former Poet Laureate Billy Collins, and elsewhere. She currently lives and writes in Iowa City.

Freya Bantiff (previously Carter) was the winner of the Canterbury Poet of the Year competition 2021. A member of Hive Poetry, she was longlisted for the Winchester Poetry Prize in 2022, won second prize in the Bedford Poetry Competition 2021, and was the winner of the Walter Swan Poetry Prize (for 18-25) in 2020, alongside the Timothy Corsellis Poetry Prize in 2017. Freya’s poems and stories have been placed in the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award (2021), Mslexia Flash Fiction Competition (2020), the Ilkley Literature Poetry Festival (2010 – 2015) and Foyle Young Poet of the Year (2015).