The Judges

JAMES MACDONALD LOCKHART established the James Lockhart Agency in 2023, having previously worked for over 20 years with Antony Harwood Ltd.
His non-fiction work, Raptor (2016), was the Winner of The Royal Society of Literature Jerwood Award for Non-Fiction in 2011 and the Authors’ Foundation Roger Deakin Award in 2011.

MICHAEL J. SULLIVAN is a New York Times, USA Today, and Washington Post bestselling author who has been nominated for nine Goodreads Choice Awards.
He has also been a pioneer in the indie publishing movement. As of 2024, he has released twenty-two Fantasy and SF novels, including: The Riyria Revelations, The Riyria Chronicles, The Legends of the First Empire, The Rise and Fall.

DR. ANTHONY JOSEPH F.R.S.L. is an award- winning Trinidad-born poet, novelist, academic and musician. He is the author of five poetry collections and three novels. His 2022 collection, Sonnets for Albert, won the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry 2022, and the OCM BOCAS Prize for Caribbean Poetry. He is a judge for the T.S. Eliot Prize in 2024.

GEORGES SZIRTES was born in Hungary, came to England as a refugee, and trained as an artist. His twelfth book of poems, Reel (2004) won the T.S. Eliot Prize, for which he has been twice shortlisted since. His latest is Fresh Out of the Sky. (2021). His memoir The Photographer at Sixteen (2019) was awarded the James Tait Black Prize in 2020. He is a co-winner of the International Booker translator’s prize, as well as of numerous others. His own books have been translated into various languages including Italian, German, Chinese, Romanian and Hungarian.

JUNOT DIAZ is a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and short story writer. He was born in the Dominican Republic and raised in New Jersey. His novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He has written two collection of short stories: Drown, and This Is How You Lose Her, which was a New York Times bestseller and National Book Award finalist. He is the recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, PEN/Malamud Award, Dayton Literary Peace Prize, Guggenheim Fellowship, and PEN/O. Henry Award. A graduate of Rutgers College, Díaz is currently the fiction editor at Boston Review and the Rudge and Nancy Allen Professor of Writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

DAMON GALGUT is a Booker Prize-winning novelist, short story writer and playwright. He was born in Pretoria in 1963. He published his first novel, The Sinless Season at the age of 17. A collection of short stories came next, Small Circles of Beings. Since then he has published another 7 books. The Good Doctor won the Internal Dublin Literary Award, the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book: Africa and was shortlisted for the 2003 Booker Prize. In a Strange Room was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2012.
Arctic Summer won the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction. In 2021, Damon won the Booker for The Promise. He lives in Cape Town, and is currently working on another collection of short stories.

BARBARA BLACK BARBARA BLACK has published two award-winning collections of short fiction: Music from a Strange Planet (2021) and Little Fortified Stories (2024). Winner of the 24th annual Writers’ Union of Canada Short Prose Competition, Black has also been long-listed twice for The Commonwealth Short Story Prize. She was winner of the Federation of BC Writers Literary Contest (Flash Fiction) 2021 and 2022, and their Literary Writes Contest (Prose Poem) 2018. In 2023, she won The Plaza Microfiction Prize and came second in The Plaza Flash Fiction Prize. Her work has been published in many international journals and anthologies. She lives in Victoria, Canada, and rides a Triumph around the ‘twisties’.

NIN ANDREWS is the author of the six chapbooks and ten full-length poetry collections including The Last Orgasm (2020), Miss August (2017), and Why God is a Woman (2015). She is the recipient of two Ohio individual artists grants, the Pearl Chapbook prize, The Wick Chapbook contest, and the Gerald Cable Award. Her book, Southern Comfort, was a finalist for the Forward prize in poetry 2010, and her collection, Why God is a Woman won the Ohiona Prize for poetry in 2016. Her poetry has been featured in numerous journals and anthologies including Ploughshares, Agni, The Paris Review ; four editions of Best American Poetry, Great American Prose Poems from Poe to the Present, and The Best American Erotic Poems. Her poetry has been translated into Turkish, performed in Prague and anthologized in England, Australia, and Mongolia. Her collection, Son or a Bird, a Memoir in Prose Poems is forthcoming in 2025 from Etruscan Press.

NATALIE DIAZ is the author of Postcolonial Love Poem, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, finalist for the National Book Award, Forward Prize in Poetry, and Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and winner of a Publishing Triangle Award. Her first book, When My Brother Was an Aztec, was
winner of an American Book Award. Diaz is Founding Director of
the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands and the Maxine and
Jonathan Marshall Chair in Modern and Contemporary Poetry at Arizona
State University, where she is a Professor in the English MFA program.
In 2021, Diaz was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American
Poets and was a finalist for the Neustadt International Prize for
Literature. She resides in Phoenix, Arizona, but is currently living
in Brooklyn as a Mellon Foundation Research Residency Fellowship and a
Senior Fellow at The New School Institute on Race, Power and Political
Economy. She is the 2024 Yale Rosenkranz Writer in Residence.

JAMIE QUATRO is Jamie Quatro is the New York Times Notable author of the story collection I Want to Show You More, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award and the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize, and Fire Sermon, a Book of the Year for The Economist, San Francisco Chronicle, Bloomberg, and The Times Literary Supplement. A new novel, Two-Step Devil, is forthcoming from Grove Press in September 2024. Quatro’s fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Harper’s, the New York Review of Books, The Guardian, and elsewhere.

LACHLAN MACKINNON has written six books of poems, most recently The Missing Months (Faber, 2022). He has received an Eric Gregory Award and a Cholmondeley Award. He has written books on Shakespeare and modern poetry, and a biography of Russian French novelist Elsa Triolet. He has reviewed regularly for the national press. He has presented academic papers, in English and French, on modern poetry and Shakespeare at conferences in both Great Britain and France and has given readings in both countries. Retired from school-teaching, he lives in Ely.

JASON MOTT is an Associate Professor in UNC Wilmington’s Department of Creative Writing. He is a bestselling author of four novels and has received numerous awards and accolades for his work including The Sir Walter Raleigh Award for Fiction, a Carnegie Medals For Excellence in Fiction Longlist selection, an Aspen Words Literary Prize Longlist selection, a Chatauqua Prize Finalist, a Joyce Carol Oates Prize Longlist selection and in 2021 his most recent novel, Hell of a Book, was the winner of the National Book Award for Fiction. Jason is best known for his 2013 bestselling debut novel, The Returned, about the reappearance of dead residents in a Missouri town, which was later adapted into the US TV series Resurrection.

PAUL FARLEY is a multi-award-winning poet, writer and broadcaster. He received the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, and his latest collection, The Mizzy, was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Costa Book Awards in 2020.

Paul has received widespread acclaim for his poetry, including the Whitbread Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award, the Cholmondeley Prize, the E. M. Forster Award and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year. As a broadcaster he has made many features, dramas and radio documentaries with the BBC on art, landscape and literature. Edgelands, a non-fiction book (co-written with Michael Symmons Roberts), was serialised as a Radio 4 Book of the Week. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he also presented BBC Radio 4’s contemporary poetry programme The Echo Chamber. His Selected Poems was published by Picador in 2014.

MONIZA ALVI was born in Lahore in 1954 to an English mother and a Pakistani father. She grew up in Hertfordshire. Her 10 collections of poetry include The Country at My Shoulder (OUP, 1993), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation which was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and selected for the 1994 New Generation Poets promotion. Europa (Bloodaxe, 2008) and At the Time of Partition (Bloodaxe, 2013) were both Poetry Book Society Choices and shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. Moniza received a Cholmondelely Award in 2002 and she is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She has recently gained a PhD from the University of East Anglia on the poetry of Stevie Smith.

VANESSA ONWUEMEZI is a writer and poet living in London. She is the winner of The White Review short story prize 2019 and her work has appeared in literary and art magazines, including Granta, frieze and Prototype. Her debut short story collection, Dark Neighbourhood, was published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in 2021 and was named one of the Guardian‘s best books of 2021. It was shortlisted for both the Republic of Consciousness Prize and the Edge Hill Prize in 2022. Her short story ‘Green Afternoon’ was shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award 2022.

DAVID GAFFNEY is the author of the novels Never Never (2008), All The Places I’ve Ever Lived (2017) and Out Of The Dark (2021), and the flash fiction and short story collections Sawn-Off Tales (2006), Aromabingo (2007), The Half-Life of Songs (2010) and More Sawn-Off Tales (2013). He has published two graphic novels with Dan Berry – The Three Rooms In Valerie’s Head (2018) and Rivers (2021) – and is working on a third. His chapbook, The Country Pub, was published on Nightjar Press in 2022, his latest short story collection with Salt Publishing, Concrete Fields, is out now and a pamphlet, Whale, with Osmosis Press is due in 2024.

American expatriate, CARRIE ETTER, has published four collections of poetry, and her fifth, Grief’s Alphabet, was published by Seren Books in April 2024. Her collection featuring prose poetry, Imagined Sons (Seren, 2014), was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry, and individual prose poems have appeared in The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem, Poetry Review, The Rialto, Shenandoah (US), Westerly (AUS), and many other journals and anthologies.

MEG POKRASS is a Scotland-based American author of eight flash collections and two novellas-in-flash. Regarded as a master of both Flash and Microfiction, her work has been included in 3 recent Norton Anthologies of flash fiction form: Flash Fiction International (W.W. Norton 2015) and New Micro (W.W. Norton 2018), and the forthcoming Flash Fiction America (W.W. Norton, 2023), as well as The Best Small Fictions (2018, 2020, 2022), and the Wigleaf Top 50. Her stories have appeared in countless literary journals including Electric Literature, Washington Square Review, McSweeney’s, Best American Poetry, Five Points and Smokelong Quarterly. She is the Founding Editor of the award-winning Best Microfiction anthology series.