Manchester Writing Competition 2023
Finalists and winners
Manchester Writing Competition 2023
The winners of the 2023 Manchester Writing Competition have been announced: Tracey Slaughter and April Yee.
2023 Judges
-
Poetry Prize Judges
Chair of judges
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.
Judges
Momtaza Mehri is a poet and independent researcher working across criticism, translation, anti-disciplinary research practices, education, and radio. She is a former Young People’s Poet Laureate for London and Frontier-Antioch Fellow at Antioch University (Los Angeles). A former Columnist-in-Residence at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s Open Space, she has also completed residencies at St. Paul’s Cathedral and the British Library. She won Manchester Metropolitan University’s Manchester Poetry Prize in 2019.
Clare Shaw (they/them) has four poetry collections with Bloodaxe. Their latest collection Towards a General Theory of Love (2022) is a poetic interrogation of love, absence and bereavement: it attracted a Northern Writer’s Award, and was a Poetry Society Book of the Year. Clare lectures at the University of Huddersfield, and is a regular tutor for Wordsworth Grasmere, the Royal Literary Fund and the Arvon Foundation. With a background in mental health and education, Clare is a keen advocate for writing as a tool of social and personal change.
-
Fiction Prize Judges
Chair of judges
Lara Williams is a writer based in Manchester. Her novel Supper Club was published in Spring 2019 by Hamish Hamilton (UK) and Putnam & Sons (US). It won The Guardian’s Not The Booker prize and has been translated into six languages. Her debut short story collection Treats was published by Freight Books in 2016 and in the US by Flatiron in 2017 under the title A Selfie As Big As The Ritz. The collection was shortlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize and longlisted for the Edge Hill Prize. Her novel The Odyssey was published by Hamish Hamilton in Spring 2022. She is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University.
Judges
Laura Barnett is a novelist, journalist and teacher of creative writing. Her debut novel, The Versions of Us (2015), was a number-one bestseller; the book has been translated into 23 languages and optioned for TV by Trademark Films. Her other novels are Greatest Hits (2017), Gifts (2021) and, most recently, This Beating Heart (2022). A fifth novel, Births, Deaths and Marriages, will be published by Doubleday in 2025. Laura is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University, and teaches widely for the agency-led writing school Curtis Brown Creative. As a freelance arts journalist, features writer and theatre critic, Laura has worked for the Guardian, the Observer and the Daily Telegraph amongst others. Born in south London, she now lives in rural Kent with her husband and son. Photo credit: Chris O’Donovan.
Oliver Harris writes the Nick Belsey series of crime novels and Elliot Kane series of espionage novels, which have been translated into over ten languages and optioned for film and television. A Shadow Intelligence was longlisted for the CWA Ian Fleming Steel dagger. Ascension was selected for BBC 2’s Between the Covers book club, and A Season in Exile was one of the Telegraph’s 50 best books of 2022. He has also published a study of psychoanalysis and Greek myth, and reviews for the Times Literary Supplement, as well as teaching creative writing at Manchester Metropolitan University.