Manchester Writing Competition 2021
Winners and Short List
Manchester Writing Competition 2021
The winners of the 2021 Manchester Writing Competition have been announced: Peter Ramm won the £10,000 Poetry Prize and Leone Ross the £10,000 Fiction Prize.
Read more about the winners on Latest News.
-
2021 Poetry Prize Finalists
Courtney Conrad
Courtney Conrad is a Jamaican poet. She is an alumna of The London Library Emerging Writers Programme, Malika’s Poetry Kitchen, Barbican Young Poets, Obsidian Foundation and Roundhouse Poetry Collective. She is a Bridport Prize Young Writers Award recipient. She has been shortlisted for The White Review Poet’s Prize, Oxford Brookes International Poetry Competition and Poetry Wales Pamphlet Competition and longlisted for the Rebecca Swift Women Poets’ Prize and The Rialto Nature and Place Competition. Her poems have appeared in Magma Poetry, Poetry Wales, The White Review, Bath Magg, Stand Magazine and Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal.
Laura Paul Watson
Laura Paul Watson lives and writes in Pine, Colorado. She is a graduate of the MFA program at the University of Florida. When not writing, she works as a General Contractor in Denver, Colorado, remodelling homes with her husband. She has placed second in the Bridport Poetry Prize and her work has also appeared in Agni, Poetry Ireland Review, and Beloit Poetry Journal, among others.
Peter Ramm
Peter Ramm is a poet who writes on the Gundungarra lands of the New South Wales Southern Highlands. His work appears in Cordite, Westerly, PlumwoodMountain, The Rialto, Eureka Street Journal and the Red Room Company. His poems have won the South Coast Writers Centre Poetry Award and the Harri Jones Memorial Award, and have shortlisted in the Bridport, ACU, Blake, and Newcastle Poetry Prizes. In 2021 he placed 3rd in The Rialto’s Nature and Place Competition and was awarded residencies at the Wollongong Botanic Gardens and WestWord’s Daffodil Cottage. His debut poetry collection Waterlines is forthcoming in 2022 with Vagabond Press.
Alyza Taguilaso
Alyza Taguilaso is a resident doctor training in General Surgery at Ospital ng Muntinlupa in the Philippines. Her poems have been shortlisted for the Bridport Poetry Prize and published in several publications, including Fantasy Magazine, Strange Horizons, ANMLY, High Chair, Stone Telling, and Kritika Kultura. She is working on her forthcoming book, Juggernaut. You can find her at wordpress (@alyzataguilastorm) or instagram (@ventral).
Jane Wilkinson
Jane Wilkinson currently lives in Norwich. In 2021 she won the Poetry Society’s Hamish Canham Prize and in 2020 received 1st and 2nd place in the Guernsey International Poetry Prize; 1st place in the Strokestown International Poetry Prize and Norfolk Prize: Café Writers competition. She won the Against the Grain Press competition and was shortlisted in Alpine Fellowship Prize in 2019. She is published (or forthcoming) in magazines including Under the Radar,Magma, The Alchemy Spoon, Ink Sweat & Tears, Envoi,Finished Creatures, Lighthouse Journal, Fenland Reed and is in anthologiesfrom Emma Press, Live Canon and Dempsey & Windle.
April Yee
April Yee is a writer and translator published in Salon, The Times Literary Supplement, and Ploughshares online. She reported in more than a dozen countries before moving to London, where she is a National Book Critics Circle Fellow, Ledbury Poetry Critic, Refugee Journalism Project mentor, and the University of East Anglia’s Malcolm Bradbury Memorial Scholar. In 2021, she was editor-in-residence at The Georgia Review, the Community of Writers’ Lucille Clifton Memorial Scholar, and listed for the Fitzcarraldo Essay Prize, the Alpine Fellowship, the Women’s Prize Trust’s Discoveries, and the Deborah Rogers Foundation Writers Award. She tweets at @aprilyee.
-
2021 Fiction Prize Finalists
Danny Beusch
Danny Beusch grew up in Peterborough but now lives in Birmingham. After obtaining a PhD in Sociology he became an accountant. He started writing short stories in 2020 and has been highly commended in the Cambridge Short Story Prize, and shortlisted in the Leicester Writes Short Story Prize. He has recently been published in Confingo magazine. He is on Twitter: @OhDannyBoyShhh
Shelley Hastings
Shelley Hastings is a London-based writer. She is the winner of The Seán O’Faoláin Short Story Prize 2021 and of The Aurora Short Fiction Prize 2021. Her stories have been published by Southword Journal, Mechanics Institute Review and The Galley Beggar Press, and are forthcoming from Dear Damsels and Thi Wurd. She is currently working as a projects manager with dementia charity Resonate Arts, has been a carer with Age UK, and is a collaborator with theatre company 1927. She has just completed her debut collection of short stories, Can You Feel It?, and is working on a novel.
Sarah Hegarty
Sarah Hegarty is a novelist and short story writer. Her short fiction has been published by Mslexia, Cinnamon Press and the Mechanics’ Institute Review, among others, and her non-fiction is included in the recent 100 Voices anthology (Unbound, 2022). She studied Mandarin at university and has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Chichester. Her second novel, drawing on her experience of living in Beijing in 1980, is out with agents and she is working on her third, inspired by her Irish heritage. She is writer in residence at George Abbot School, Guildford.
Leone Ross
Leone Ross is a three-time novelist, short story writer and editor. Her work has been variously nominated for the Edge Hill, Jhalak, OCM Bocas and Goldsmiths awards and her most recent novel This One Sky Day (Faber) was longlisted for the 2022 Women’s Prize for Fiction. Ross is the editor of Glimpse, the first Black British anthology of speculative short stories, out with Peepal Tree Press in 2022. The Times Literary Supplement described her as a “master of detail, whose world materialises in…precisely placed dots of colour”. Photo credit: Mahdis Keshavarz.
Nicholas Ruddock
Nicholas Ruddock is a Canadian physician and writer. He has published three novels and a short story collection in Canada, most recently Last Hummingbird West of Chile, 2021. In the UK and Ireland, he has been shortlisted for the London Sunday Times Short Story Award 2016, the Moth Poetry Prize 2019, and he has twice placed first in the Bridport Prize Competition. He has also had poetry in Irish Pages. See NicholasRuddock.com for details, and to watch, for just two minutes, a video for Hummingbird.
Naomi Wood
Naomi Wood is a novelist and short-story writer based in Norwich. She is the bestselling author of The Godless Boys, Mrs. Hemingway and The Hiding Game. Mrs Hemingway won a Jerwood Prize, was shortlisted for the International Dylan Thomas Prize, and was a Richard and Judy Bookclub Choice. The Hiding Game was longlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, and shortlisted for the Historical Writers’ Association Gold Crown. Naomi lives in Norwich with her family, and teaches Creative Writing at UEA. She is currently working on her first collection of short stories, entitled Anti-Mother. Photo credit: Christa Holka.
-
Poetry Prize Judges
Romalyn Ante is a Filipino-British, Wolverhampton-based poet, editor, and essayist. She is co-founding editor of harana poetry. Her debut poetry collection is Antiemetic for Homesickness (Chatto, 2020). Romalyn’s honours include the Poetry London Prize, Manchester Poetry Prize, Oxford Brookes EAL Poetry Prize, Society of Author’s Foundation Award, and Creative Future Writing Award. Her poetry and essays have been published/featured in BBC World News, World Literature Today, BBC Radio 4, Harper’s Bazaar, Poetry Review, Magma, amongst others. Romalyn works full-time as a specialist nurse practitioner, specialising in High-intensity Cognitive Behavioural Therapy for children and young people.
Malika Booker is an award-winning poet, theatre-maker and multi-disciplinary artist, and an experienced writing competition judge. She is the founder of the Malika’s Poetry Kitchen writers’ community initiative. In 2019 she was commissioned to write and perform a poem about Mars for a BBC Science series about the solar system and was awarded a prestigious Society of Authors Cholmondley Award for her contribution to poetry. She joined Manchester Metropolitan University as Lecturer in Creative Writing in January 2019.
Zaffar Kunial was born in Birmingham and now lives in Hebden Bridge. His first full collection Us, published by Faber & Faber in 2018, was listed for the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Costa Poetry Award, the Roehampton Poetry Prize, the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize, the Rathbones Folio Prize and the Portico Prize. A pamphlet, Six, was out from Faber in 2019.
-
Fiction Prize Judges
Hilaire grew up in Melbourne and lives in London. She is co-author with Joolz Sparkes of the poetry collection London Undercurrents (Holland Park Press, 2019). Her collaboration with the artist Stephen Graham, indoors looking out (lower case press, 2020), features haiku and tanka written in response to lockdown. Short stories have also appeared in magazines including MeniscusandUnder the Radar and in several anthologies, including Best British Short Stories 2021. Her novel Hearts on Ice was published by Serpent’s Tail in 2000. Photo credit: Naomi Woddis.
Simon Okotie is a fiction writer and essayist. He is the author of Whatever Happened to Harold Absalon?, In the Absence of Absalon and After Absalon, a critically acclaimed trilogy of novels published by Salt. His work has appeared in FT Weekend and gorse, and at 3:AM Magazine and The White Review. “Two Degrees of Freedom”, a short story, is published by Nightjar Press. “Bindings” will be published in Best British Short Stories 2021.
Nicholas Royle has chaired the judging panel for the Manchester Fiction Prize since 2009. He is Reader in Creative Writing in the Manchester Writing School at Manchester Met and the author of seven novels, including The Director’s Cut, Antwerp and First Novel. He has written more than 100 short stories, some of which feature in his collection Mortality. He has edited 20 anthologies, including the Best British Short Stories series and runs Nightjar Press, which publishes new stories in chapbook format. His memoir White Spines: Confessions of a Book Collector was published in 2021. He lives in Manchester.