Results

Alinah Azadeh is a writer and artist of British Iranian heritage. She writes poetry, fiction and non-fiction – and records for radio and podcast. Her story The Beard, was published in the speculative fiction anthology Glimpse (Peepal Tree Press) and in Best British Short Stories (Salt). As inaugural Writer-in-Residence across the Seven Sisters/Sussex Coast for South Downs National Park, 2020-24 she co-wrote and curated the audio walk We Hear You Now, embedding new stories by women of global heritage into the coastline. Alinah teaches, mentors and is Associate Lecturer in Creative Writing at Chichester University. She publishes regularly on Substack.
www.alinahazadeh.com

Dayna Bateman is a recovering tech worker (MSc, HCI) and an emerging writer. She received the 2025 American Literary Review Award in Essays for Deracination, Or How to Disappear, in which she interrogates the decision of her Indigenous Sámi ancestors to pass for White in the racial climate of 1880s America. A 2023 Storyknife Resident and an alum of the Tin House, Kenyon Review, and Granta Memoir workshops, Dayna was awarded a 2026 PEN/Jean Stein Grant For Literary Oral History and is a 2026 Klaustrið Artist in Residence.

Rebecca D’Monté has a PhD in English Literature/Theatre History and was a university lecturer for many years. However, it is only since early retirement she has brought to fruition her dream of being a full-time author. Apart from her cultural memoir, Unleashed: Sex (& Love) in the Digital Age, she has recently completed a literary novel, Our Shadow Self, and is researching a new book about the 1960s art and music scene. A Londoner born and bred, she now lives in the west country where her hobbies include reading, art, cinema, history, and people watching in cafés.

Emma Hill-French grew up in Devon, England. She read English at New College, Oxford, where her tutor, the poet Craig Raine, observed that she was ‘a noticer’ and encouraged her to write. After graduating, Emma dabbled briefly in journalism until she realised she was temperamentally unsuited to newsrooms. She moved to a creative agency as a copywriter, which felt much more like home. Emma’s been self-employed as a writer and editor for nearly 20 years. She lives in South-West London with her husband, teenage stepchildren, young daughter, and beloved cocker spaniel, Joy. Bad at Love is Emma’s first book.

Brian Selman was raised in the woods of East Texas. He built a life far from the world he came from—but never stopped trying to make sense of it. Through the Briars and Brambles is his first book, a story of survival, separation, and the hope of breaking generational cycles. He lives with his wife, Bailey, and spends his time between Washington, D.C., and wherever the road leads next. He currently works for the U.S. Department of State.

Hilary Standing is a retired academic living in Brighton. She has a PhD in Social Anthropology and spent several decades working in international health research. After retirement, she completed a Creative Writing MA from Royal Holloway, University of London. Her novel, The Inheritance Powder, about mass arsenic poisoning in Bangladesh, was shortlisted for the Myriad (2011) and Yeovil (2014) Prizes for unpublished novels and published in the UK (2016) and Bangladesh (2017). Her memoir explores her relationship with her sister who has Down’s syndrome and asks what links a tiny chromosomal change to a unique and gloriously alive person.

Shirley Anne Cook is an author and poet from Denham, Buckinghamshire. A former primary school teacher, she taught English at the American school in Cairo. As well as poetry, Shirley writes on local history, and she has also published several novels for children. Shirley’s poems have won or been placed in competitions such as Mslexia, Basil Bunting and The Plough Poetry Prize, and in previous entries to The Bridport Prize. Her work has appeared in anthologies and magazines, and she has published several collections, including Turning the Map Over, and a children's poetry anthology – Dinosaur Din and Other Poems.

Lindsay Fursland taught English and Drama in various comprehensives in North London for thirty years until a heart operation eighteen years ago went wrong, necessitating giving up work. His poem is a record of that time. He is the Poetry Society's Stanza rep in Cambridge, where he hosts monthly workshops via Zoom and in person. He is on the committee of CB1, a poetry event organisation which puts on regular readings and open mics in the city. He is also an occasional tutor for adult education groups in the local area.

Sylvie Jane Lewis’s poetry is published in The London Magazine, Acumen, fourteen poems, Culture Matters, and Ink Sweat and Tears, and is commended in the Ware Poets Competition, the Free Verse Prize, and Verve Poem of the Month. She has an English MPhil from Cambridge and was a 2024 Poetry Society Young Critic. As of October 2025, she is pursuing an AHRC-funded Literature and Film PhD at the University of Brighton on literary modernism and cinematic fairies.

D A Angelo, a UK based poet was shortlisted for the 2023 Manchester Poetry Prize and the 2025 Artemesia Arts Poetry Competition. His work has featured in The Shore, The York Literary Review, Spellbinder, South, BarBar and The Crank. New work is forthcoming in Magma. Find him on Instagram at @d_a_angelo

Ryan Caidic is a Filipino poet and advertising creative. Born and raised in the Philippines, he later moved to Germany and now lives in Denmark. His poetry explores themes of diaspora, family narratives and the natural world, and has appeared in Southeast Review, Breakwater Review, Poetry Wales and elsewhere. He won the International Poetry Prize at London’s inaugural Bermondsey Literary Festival, placed second in the Spring Onyx Poetry Prize, and has been shortlisted for several honors including the Peseroff Prize, Alpine Fellowship, and Bridport Prize. His collection of poems, 50 Ways Home, is forthcoming from Fernwood Press (US).

Marie-Louise Eyres was a winner in the Poetry News 2021 "Lesser Loss" competition, she has been highly commended in the Bridport, Ginkgo AONB, Mslexia pamphlet and the James Tate prizes, and nominated for a Forward (single poem) prize. Recent poems can be found in Poetry Magazine, Portland Review, Stand, Shearsman, Agenda, Acumen, Modern Poetry in Translation and elsewhere. She has six pamphlets available from the following small presses: Maverick Duck, Ghost City, Alien Buddha and FLP.

Valentina Gnup's poetry collection, Ruined Music, was published by Grayson Books in 2024. In 2023 she won the Tucson Festival of Books Literary Award for Poetry; in 2019, she won the Lascaux Prize in Poetry; in 2017, she won the Ekphrastic Challenge from Rattle; and in 2015, she won the Rattle Reader’s Choice Award. She has published two chapbooks and her poetry has appeared in numerous literary journals including The Bangalore Review, December, Palette Poetry, Nimrod, and The New Guard. She is a retired teacher who lives in Mill Valley, California. Website: www.valentinagnup.com

Helga Jermy is an English born poet, now living in Australia on Lutruwita-Tasmania’s northwest coast. Her work has appeared widely in literary journals and anthologies, and her poems and short fiction have been commended/shortlisted/longlisted in major national and international prizes. Her fourth poetry collection, Time Piece, was published by Walleah Press 2025. Following the Ink collection is forthcoming from 5Islands Press later this year. Website: helgajermypoetry.com.au.

Kirsty MacDonald is a Scottish poet writing on the domestic, relationships, identity, and the body as sites of memory and belonging. She completed her MLitt in Creative Writing at the University of Dundee in 2017, and her work has appeared in anthologies such as A Bees Breakfast (2017), Golden Hours (2023), and an online gallery on the John Byrne Award website (2021). In 2023 her poems featured alongside an exhibition on Scotland’s witch trials. Alongside publication, she runs creative writing workshops, drawing on local history and storytelling to connect communities through language.

Teresa Ott is an American-Canadian poet. She is the recipient of the 2023 Joyce Carol Oates Award in Poetry, the 2022 Poetry London Prize and a 2021 Canada Council for the Arts grant. She was a finalist for the 2018 Moth Poetry Prize, and her work has been nominated for Pushcart Prizes and a National Magazine Award. She holds an MFA from Syracuse University. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Prairie Fire, The Malahat Review, Poetry London, Alaska Quarterly Review, New Letters, The Missouri Review, The Moth, The Fiddlehead and elsewhere. She lives in Toronto with her daughter.

Vuong Pham’s poetry explores themes of displacement and cultural identity. One of his poems, ‘Mother’ is studied as a prescribed text in the NSW HSC English syllabus (2019—2025). His honours include the SCWC Poetry Prize (2025); Local Word Poetry Prize (2025); ACU Poetry Prize (2024); Shinhaiku Contest (2024); Newcastle Poetry Prize (2023); Free Expression Haiku Competition (2013); and Jean Cecily Drake-Brockman Poetry Prize (2013). He is currently working on his first full-length collection of poetry, ‘Reborn’. Read more on his website at: https://vuongphampoetry.wordpress.com

Joyce Schmid's poems have recently appeared in The Hudson Review, New Ohio Review, Passager, Salt, and other journals and anthologies. Her poetry chapbook, Natural Science was published in March 2025 by Glass Lyre Press, and another, Superbloom, is forthcoming from Kelsay Books. She lives with her husband of over half a century in Palo Alto, California, USA.

Melissa Studdard writes poetry, song cycles, libretti, and fiction, and is the author of six books. Her writing has been featured in The New York Times, The Guardian, and other major outlets, and has won many awards, including the Poetry Society of America's Lucille Medwick Award. As a librettist/lyricist, she has had works commissioned by Aspen Music Festival, Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, Wolf Trap, Yale University Glee Club and Yale Choral Artists, the University of Michigan School of Music, and more. With Kelli Russell Agodon, she co-hosts the Youtube poetry series Poems You Need. You can find her at www.melissastuddard.com.

Ruth Bushi is a freelance journalist. She was born in India, but grew up in Yorkshire, Northumbria, and Cumbria, before attending university in Lancaster and Durham. She does actually leave the North on occasion: she worked in publishing in London for many years … before returning to Cumbria, where she lives, works, writes, and wonders. Her fiction has been shortlisted for an Arvon Award, and twice longlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. She writes about film and fiction storytelling at www.thehaughtyculturist.com, and is author of Decoding “The Turn of the Screw”. letterboxd.com/ruthbushi | bsky.app/profile/ruthbushi.com

Claire McClure is a writer and former journalist and editor from Ireland. She was mentored by award-winning short story writer and novelist Claire Keegan in 2023 as part of the Irish Writers Centre's National Mentoring Programme. Her short story Show Her the Ropes was shortlisted for the Bridport Prize in 2017. Claire lives in Belfast and is completing her first short story collection. She is represented by Rosie Pierce at Curtis Brown.

Abbey Perreault began writing stories as a child when the word “bored” was banned in her household, which then gave her license to read her very long stories to a captive audience that was also not allowed to use that word. She worked in journalism, educational programming, and podcast production for a decade before coming back to fiction for the first time as an adult, earning her MFA from Boston University this year. Her work explores human and nonhuman connections in a world shaped by consumerism and environmental decline. She is currently working on a novel and thinking about sperm whales.

Alison Armstrong is a writer of fiction and non-fiction. Her play Lost Voices of Morecambe Winter Gardens was supported by a Literature Matters Award (Royal Society of Literature) and the Arts Council (2021). Her first novel Fossils was published in 2022 by Saraband. Her second novel Museum of Infinite Light comes out in 2027 with Bluemoose Books. She was supported with a fellowship at the Jan Michalski Foundation in 2024 and is working on a new novel based on Antarctic exploration. She works as a freelance editor among other jobs and lives in Edinburgh and Lancaster.

Meagan Arthur is a cross-genre writer from the Seattle area. She holds an MFA in Prose from the University of Washington, where her fiction was awarded the Grace Milliman Pollock Award, and she is currently pursuing a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Utah, where she has been awarded the Vice Presidential Fellowship. Her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review, River Styx, Michigan Quarterly Review, Waxwing, The Journal, Puerto Del Sol, Quarter After Eight, Cream City Review, and elsewhere. She serves as the Senior Prose Editor of Quarterly West.

Eirinie Carson is a Black British writer living in California. A mother of two, she sits on the board of The Writers Grotto in San Francisco. Her work has appeared in LitHub, Mother Magazine, The Notre Dame Review, Mortal Mag, Electric Literature, The Sonora Review and others. She was the NEA Distinguished Fellow at the Hambidge Center, and has been supported by Mesa Refuge, Hedgebrook and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Eirinie's first book, The Dead Are Gods (Melville House), was named one of Kirkus Reviews Best Books of 2023. Her debut novel Bloodfire, Baby, is published in 2026.

Sophie Hampton is an award-winning writer and editor based in Cambridge, UK. Her fiction has been broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and published in leading literary journals and anthologies including The London Magazine, Southword, Mslexia, and Fictive Dream. She has won competitions including the Sean O’Faolain International Short Story Competition, The London Magazine Short Story Prize, and HISSAC, and placed or listed in the Commonwealth Prize, Bridport, Bristol, Bath, Exeter Writers, Wells Festival and Fish among others. She has a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing from UEA and her novel Neighbours, Strangers was longlisted for the Discoveries Prize 2024.

Graham Hotchkiss formerly worked in film and television in Los Angeles and most recently lived in London working in video games. His work has appeared in Dirt and Fugitives & Futurists. He lives in New York City with his wife and their two large cats.

Aliyah Kim Keshani is a London-based writer. In 2017, she was awarded a commended place in the life writing category for the Wasafiri New Writing Prize. She was also shortlisted for the Penguin WriteNow Novel Mentorship Programme. In 2018, her poem ‘The Cook’s Revenge’ was selected to feature in My Lot is a Sky, an international women’s poetry anthology. Her short story ‘Remember This’ was also included in the anthology 100 Voices. She is currently working on a novel that explores themes of secrecy, guilt, luck and trauma within a family, and very much hopes to complete it this year.

Eve Newstead is a writer from Newcastle, England, living in Vancouver, Canada. Her short fiction has been thrice short-listed for the Bridport Prize, placed top 5 in the Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize, and published in Wasifiri Magazine, Aayo, Fictive Dream and The Plentitudes. Excerpts of her first novel have been shortlisted for The Master’s Review novel competition and published in The Bedford Square Review. At present, Eve is seeking publication for her first novel and writing her second novel. When she’s not crafting words, she’s lost in fabric, wool, watercolour paints… or the Canadian wilderness.

Jane Saotome is an artist and writer. She was born in Birmingham, lived in Japan and lives with her family in South London. She worked for many years as an art psychotherapist in Mental Health settings in the NHS. She has MA in Creative Writing from Bath Spa University.

Catriona Shine is an Irish-Norwegian writer and architect. Her critically acclaimed debut novel, Habitat, was published by the Lilliput Press in 2024 and longlisted for the McKitterick Prize. She is a fellow of the Hawthornden Foundation, an awardee of the Evolution Programme at the Irish Writers Centre, and she has represented Dublin UNESCO City of Literature at the Nanjing International Writers' Residency. Her writing has been published in The Dublin Review, Southword, Aesthetica, Hemingway Shorts, Channel, Nanjing Daily, Frogpond, The Cormorant, Thi Wurd and elsewhere. She gratefully acknowledges the support of the Arts Council of Ireland.

Tom Vowler is an award-winning author living in the UK. A university lecturer with a PhD in creative writing, his work has featured on BBC radio and been translated into multiple languages. He tutors for Arvon and his latest book is a collection of flash fiction, titled The Trajectory of Ghosts. In 2024 he won the V.S. Pritchett Short Story Prize. More at www.tomvowler.co.uk

Jake Salazar studies English at the University of Missouri, St. Louis. His work is expressive, blending formal poetic elements with contemporary subject matter and linguistics. Jake is passionate about poetry, short fiction, and language as a site of play. He is a member of the Lipan Apache Tribe of Texas, and currently lives in St. Louis, Missouri with his two cats. He is compiling his first collection of poetry.

JJ Peña (pronouns he/they) is a queer, burrito-blooded writer. JJ has won a few creative non-fiction flash/hybrid contests, has work included in the Best Small Fiction (2023), Best Microfiction (2020), Wigleaf’s Top 50 (Very) Short Fictions, & serves as a flash fiction reader for SplitLip Magazine. JJ lives in Las Vegas.

Maria Leyviman, while working in finance, diligently followed Tolstoy’s decree not to write fiction unless one cannot help it, until one day, she could no longer help it. She took a few creative writing classes and had since been immersed in the unbearable joy of writing short stories and working on her debut novel. Maria travelled all her life and is now settled in London with her husband, three sons, two cats, and a dog. She reads much, speaks six languages, and plays the piano.

Adele Gallogly is a nonprofit writer/editor and an emerging flash fiction writer living in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. Her stories have appeared in FlashFlood, Six Sentences, 50-Word Stories, and elsewhere. In 2025, she received first place in Writers’ Hour Magazine’s Blue Hour Contest, and she was shortlisted in The New Writers 100-Word Writing Competition. She fell hard for very short fiction after joining SmokeLong Quarterly’s March Micro Marathon (where she workshopped her 2025 Bridport story), and writing in community has become vital to her creative practice. Find her on BlueSky and IG/Threads @adelegallogly.

Nick Havergal has written for theatre and radio having had work produced at Bristol Old Vic and for BBC Radio 4. He has previously been listed in the Bridport Prize, the New Writers Flash Fiction Competition and the Bath Flash Fiction Award. His flash stories have been published in two BFFA anthologies and as part of the NFFD FlashFlood 2025. He lives in Bristol UK and can very (very) occasionally be found at @nickhavergal.bsky.social.

Emily Rinkema lives and writes in northern Vermont, USA. Her writing has recently appeared in The Sun Magazine, SmokeLong Quarterly, and X-R-A-Y Lit, and she has stories in the Best American Nonrequired Reading, Bath Flash and Oxford Flash anthologies. You can read her work on her website https://emilyrinkema.wixsite.com/my-site or follow her on X or IG (@emilyrinkema).

Shelley Roche-Jacques’ work has appeared in magazines such as Litro, Magma, The Rialto, Brevity and The Boston Review. Her poetry pamphlet Ripening Dark was published in 2015, followed by a collection of dramatic monologues, Risk the Pier, in 2017. She has been shortlisted for the Bath Flash Fiction Award, the Fish Prize, and previously Highly Commended in the Bridport Prize for Flash Fiction in 2021. She lives in Barnsley, Yorkshire, and teaches Creative Writing at Sheffield Hallam University. X: @RocheJacques / Bluesky: @shelleyr-j.bsky.social‬

Merrie Snell is an American writer and academic living in Northumberland, England with her husband and dog Tilly (a.k.a. The Bewildebeest). Her work has appeared in The New England Review, AGNI, Cimarron Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. Snell holds an MFA in fiction writing from The University of Iowa and a PhD in music from Newcastle University. Her monograph, Lipsynching, on popular music and the (dis)embodied voice is available from Bloomsbury Academic. She is currently at work on a novel and heads a team dedicated to establishing ‘tequila!’ as a unit of musical punctuation.

Grace Forrest is a writer from Ireland. Her short stories have featured in Irish Country Magazine, The Irish Independent and The Galway Review. Grace originally studied and practiced Law before becoming a teacher. She began writing stories in her teens, being influenced by the emotionally-packed works of Lorenzo Carcaterra, Toni Morrison and Margaret Atwood. Donna Tartt’s The Little Friend made her want to become an author. Grace lives in Dublin with her husband and two children. The Checkout Girl is her first novel.

Sadhbh Moriarty is a queer bilingual writer from Ireland whose work inhabits the shifting ground between landscape, myth, and identity. Moving between English and Irish, her fiction treats language as both medium and act of reclamation, often threaded with magical realism. Winner of Duais Foras na Gaeilge and The Eamonn Keane Full-Length Play Award, her work has appeared in Mslexia, Arlen House, The Bournemouth Journal, Bloomers and Époque Press, with plays staged nationally. She is currently completing a bilingual short story collection that reframes Irishness as both memory and possibility, seen through a queer, decolonial lens and rooted in landscape.

Kit Ingram is a Canadian writer based in London. His poetry publications include Aqueous Red (Broken Sleep Books) and Alice and Antius (Penrose Press). His hybrid collection X Coranto, newly released, reimagines the early news pamphlet through a queer lens to reanimate the haunted history of a South London street. Kit’s writing has been listed by the Bridport Prize, the Out-Spoken Prize, the Grindstone International Novel Prize, and the National Poetry Competition. He is the founder of Ingram Literary, a studio supporting emerging writers.

Lewis Johnson holds a PhD in class and contemporary literature. After teaching English at the University of Liverpool, he now spends his time working on fiction, writing back to the working-class communities of his childhood. He has been shortlisted twice in the Northern Writers' Awards (2023 & 2025), before being listed in the Bridport Prize's First Novel Award (2025). He is Reviews Writer at Zæsur, a Berlin-based literary journal. He can be found on Instagram at lewis_johnson634.

Sarah Parfitt is a writer, editor, and teacher of Creative Writing, who grew up in the spaces between landscapes: Wales, Virginia, and the Somerset Levels. She writes long and short-form fiction, nonfiction, and poetry; her writing has appeared online, in print, and via exhibition. Her writing and research interests include the environmental humanities, nature and climate writing, etymology, the modern Gothic, and strange narrative voices. She has worked with Indie Novella’s Alternative Book Fair since its inception. Sarah has an MA and a PhD in Creative Writing, and currently teaches within the Warwick Writing Programme at the University of Warwick.

Violet Stapleton is a writer particularly inspired by literary and gothic fiction. Born in New Zealand, she moved to the UK when she was five and grew up in rural Dorset, where her parents instilled a love of literature in her through a well-used library card and too many trips to the bookshop. Currently studying English and Creative Writing at the University of Exeter, she spends her time writing anything from flash fiction to novels, exploring local forests, and getting through the many books occupying the surfaces of her room.

Sylvie Jane Lewis’s poetry is published in The London Magazine, Acumen, fourteen poems, Culture Matters, and Ink Sweat and Tears, and is commended in the Ware Poets Competition, the Free Verse Prize, and Verve Poem of the Month. She has an English MPhil from Cambridge and was a 2024 Poetry Society Young Critic. As of October 2025, she is pursuing an AHRC-funded Literature and Film PhD at the University of Brighton on literary modernism and cinematic fairies.

Shirley Anne Cook is an author and poet from Denham, Buckinghamshire. A former primary school teacher, she taught English at the American school in Cairo. As well as poetry, Shirley writes on local history, and she has also published several novels for children. Shirley’s poems have won or been placed in competitions such as Mslexia, Basil Bunting and The Plough Poetry Prize, and in previous entries to The Bridport Prize. Her work has appeared in anthologies and magazines, and she has published several collections, including Turning the Map Over, and a children's poetry anthology – Dinosaur Din and Other Poems.