Manchester Writing Competition 2023 shortlists announced

Two international shortlists have been announced for the Manchester Poetry Prize and Manchester Fiction Prize, which together make up the 2023 Manchester Writing Competition, the UK’s biggest awards for unpublished writing.

The two six-strong shortlists feature emerging writers from across the UK, New Zealand, USA, and the Netherlands, demonstrating Manchester’s status as an international centre for creative writing.

Set up by then Poet Laureate and current Creative Director of Manchester Met’s Manchester Writing School Professor Carol Ann Duffy in 2008, the competition has awarded more than £220,000 in prize money to writers since its launch.

The two awards celebrate Manchester as an international city of writers, find diverse new voices, and create opportunities for writer development. Each year, two £10,000 prizes are awarded to new and established writers: the Manchester Poetry Prize for the best portfolio of poems, and the Manchester Fiction Prize for the best short story.

This year marks 15 years of the competition which has helped to accelerate the careers of previous winners and finalists including Mona Arshi, Helen Mort, Alison Moore, Pascale Petit, and Momtaza Mehri.

The Fiction Prize judges said that choosing the shortlist “seemed near-impossible” while the Poetry Prize judges commended entries as “outstanding poems that demonstrate the quality of contemporary poetry”.

2023 Manchester Poetry Prize Finalists

• D A Angelo
• Elena Croitoru
• Shakeema Edwards
• Debra Marquart
• Katie O’Pray
• Tracey Slaughter

2023 Manchester Fiction Prize Finalists

• Edward Hogan
• Dayal Kindy
• David McGrath
• Nicholas Petty
• Chloë Philp
• April Yee

The winners will be announced at an awards ceremony on December 8, hosted at Manchester Met’s Grosvenor East building, home to Manchester Writing School and Manchester Poetry Library, and the ceremony will be live-streamed for the first time this year.

The Poetry Prize judging panel is chaired by Malika Booker, award-winning poet who recently won Forward Prize for Best Single Poem, and Lecturer in Creative Writing at Manchester Met. The panel was completed by poet Clare Shaw, and Momtaza Mehri, poet and independent researcher and winner of the Poetry Prize in 2019 and this year’s Forward Prize for Best First Collection.

Booker said: “What unites this year’s shortlisted portfolios is their remarkable singularity. The poems we have chosen both attend to and break with form, irrepressible in their varied approaches to movements and turns. These risk-taking poems disrupt our expectations at every turn, by pushing at the limits of language, with intertextual depth.

“History, violence, kinship, wit, humour, and tenderness flow through these poems, as they illuminate the mundane and spectacular, their imagery lingering with the reader long after the last line. These are disarming poems, haunting poems, ones which sneak up on you, confronting your expectations and defences. They reveal themselves anew, again and again. These outstanding poems that demonstrate the quality of contemporary poetry.”

The Fiction Prize judging panel is chaired by Lara Williams, award-winning writer, and Lecturer in Creative Writing at Manchester Met. The panel was completed by Laura Barnett, novelist and journalist, and writer Oliver Harris, who are both Senior Lecturers in Creative Writing at Manchester Met.

Williams said: “One and a half thousand stories of overwhelming quality and eclecticism, these stories have showed such an incredible breadth of imagination, emotional resonance and technical expertise. Each of them challenged us to think, feel and reflect on the people we are, and the world we live in.

“Whittling it down to a shortlist seemed near-impossible, though we are confident we have unearthed some stories that will linger in the mind of the reader; by turns mesmerising, explosive, haunting, innovative, eye-opening and unforgettable. These stories stand as testament to the rude health of the short story form right now, in the UK and around the world. Every one of them is world-class.”

The prizes have been crucial in supporting emerging writers at getting a foothold in the industry, providing winners with some financial security to focus on writing full-time, as well as attracting literary agents and getting novel or collections published. The competition also cements Manchester’s status as an international UNESCO City of Literature.

A list of highly commended long listed entrants was also selected by the Poetry judges, and comprise of entrants from across the globe including Austria, America and Australia.

2023 Manchester Poetry Prize – highly commended (long listed) 

• Ash Adams, United States  
• Isabelle Baafi, United Kingdom 
• Melanie Banim, Liverpool, United Kingdom   
• Kathryn Bevis, Winchester, United Kingdom  
• Kizziah Burton, United States 
• Zoë Green, Austria  
• Katie Hale, Cumbria, United Kingdom  
• Nick Makoha, United Kingdom 
• Javier Sandoval, United States 
• Victor Tapner, United Kingdom 
• Marvin Thompson, United Kingdom  
• Mark Tredinnick, Australia 
• Jack Wiltshire, United Kingdom 
• Chloé Rose Whitmore, Nottingham 

2023 Manchester Poetry Prize Finalists

D A Angelo (they/them) is a disabled, working-class UK-based poet with work currently featured in Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, Sage Cigarettes, Flights of the Dragonfly, Impspired, The Amazine and Petrichor Mag. They are currently interested in prose poetry, surrealism and alternative perspectives in nature writing.  

Elena Croitoru is a British-Romanian writer. She won the Charles Causley Poetry Prize, the South Bank Poetry Prize, the Retreat West First Chapter Prize and was commended in the National Poetry Competition. She was also a finalist for prizes such as the Montreal Poetry Prize, Bridport Prize & other awards. Her first poetry pamphlet, The Country With No Playgrounds, won the Live Canon Pamphlet Prize and was published in ‘21. 

Shakeema Edwards is an Antiguan American writer living in Belfast. She studied poetry at the Seamus Heaney Centre as the recipient of its International Poetry Scholarship and has received an Ireland Chair of Poetry Student Award. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in New Isles Press, Channel, Propel Magazine, and The Apiary. 

Debra Marquart is an American poet, memoirist, and musician living in Ames, Iowa. She teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing and Environment at Iowa State University and the Stonecoast Low-Residency MFA Program at University of Southern Maine. Currently serving as Iowa’s Poet Laureate and the Senior Editor of Flyway: Journal of Writing & Environment, Marquart is the author of eight books, including The Horizontal World: Growing Up Wild in the Middle of Nowhere and Gratitude with Dogs Under Stars: New & Collected Poems. She has released two CD projects—Orange Parade and A Regular Dervish—with her jazz poetry, rhythm and blues band, The Bone People.  

Katie O’Pray is a creative facilitator, living in Bedford. They have been the winner of The ruth weiss Foundation’s Emerging Poet’s Prize and the Oxford Brookes International Poetry Competition, and are currently a Barbican Young Poet. Their work has been featured in publications such as bath magg and berlin lit, as well as mental health campaigns for East London NHS Foundation Trust, among others. The poetry workshops they deliver focus on writing as a therapeutic tool. Their debut full-length collection ‘APRICOT’ was published by Out-Spoken Press in October 2022. 

Tracey Slaughter is a writer of poetry, fiction and personal essays from Aotearoa New Zealand. Her latest works are the short story collection Devil’s Trumpet (Te Herenga Waka Press, 2021) and the poetry collection Conventional Weapons (Te Herenga Waka Press, 2019). Her work has received numerous awards, including the Fish Short Story Prize 2020 and the Bridport Prize 2014, and she has twice been shortlisted for the Manchester Prize, once in Poetry, once in Fiction. She teaches Creative Writing at the University of Waikato, where she edits the literary journals Mayhem and Poetry Aotearoa.  

Read the 2023 shortlisted poems

2023 Manchester Fiction Prize Finalists

Edward Hogan is from Derby. He has worked in libraries and colleges, and he is now a lecturer at the Open University. His novels include The Electric, and Blackmoor. Ed’s recent short stories have been longlisted for the Sunday Times Short Story Award, and shortlisted for the V.S. Pritchett Prize, amongst others. His story ‘Single Sit’ won the Galley Beggar Press Short Story Prize in 2021. He lives in Brighton. 

Born, raised and now once again based in the West Midlands, Dayal Kindy has earned writing scholarships and awards that have supported her writing journey and led to several short stories being published. She is slowly writing a novel alongside working in NHS Mental Health services. In 2022 she was longlisted for the BBC Short Story Award, was runner up for the Mo Siewcharran Prize and a winner of the Space to Write Project. 

David McGrath is Irish and lives in London. For short stories, he has won The Bare Fiction Prize, the 2023 Bryan MacMahon Short Story Competition and the 2023 Cill Rialaig Residency which he used to complete a novel set in a pub in rural Ireland. Also this year he has been published in The New Writer’s edition of The Stinging Fly and won a mentorship with the Irish Writers Centre. In the past he has won StorySlam at The Royal Festival Hall and has been Most Valuable Player for Liars’ League London twice. 

Nicholas Petty is a British writer, originally from Macclesfield and currently living in Utrecht, the Netherlands. His short stories have previously featured in the Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award, the Galley Beggar Press Short Story Prize, and the Desperate Literature Short Story Prize, among others. They have also been published in the New England Review, The London Magazine, The Moth Magazine, and elsewhere. He is currently working on a novel and a short story collection. 

Chloë Philp is a writer and playwright currently completing a BA in Creative Writing at the University of Gloucestershire. Her dramatic writing has been directed at the Stroud Theatre Festival and Roses Theatre and her prose writing has been read at the Cheltenham Literature Festival. Chloë is currently writing her debut novel and loves all fiction with diverse, speculative themes at its core. 

April Yee’s poetry, fiction, and essays have won or been listed for Best of the Net, The Best American Essays, the Ivan Juritz Prize, and the Manchester Poetry Prize. A Harvard alumna and former journalist, she reported in more than a dozen countries before moving to London, where she has served as The Georgia Review’s editor-in-residence and Refugee Journalism Project mentor. Her work is in The Times Literary Supplement, The Offing, and Electric Literature, and she has received support from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Southbank Centre, the National Book Critics Circle, and the University of East Anglia.