Manchester Writing Competition 2017

(in alphabetical order)

Romalyn Ante

Romalyn Ante grew up in the Philippines and moved to the UK in 2005. Her debut poetry pamphlet is Rice & Rain. She is a Jerwood/Arvon mentee 2017-2018. She is Commended in Battered Moons Poetry Competition and received Creative Future Literary Awards for Poetry in 2017. As a recipient of Artists’ International Development Fund, she travelled back to the Philippines in November 2017 to write about culture, identity, and reconnections, and to talk about her craft at De La Salle University, Manila.

Ella Frears

Ella Frears is a poet and visual artist based in south-east London. She has had poetry published in Poetry London, The Rialto, POEM and the Moth among others. Ella is a trustee and editor for Magma Poetry and was shortlisted for Young Poet Laureate for London 2014. She has completed various residencies for Tate Modern, the National Trust, Newlyn Art Gallery and most recently she was Poet in Residence at Royal Holloway University writing about the Cassini Space Mission. Ella’s debut pamphlet Passivity, Electricity, Acclivity is forthcoming with Goldsmiths Press. 

Don Judson

Don Judson is a poet and fiction writer living in Attleboro, MA, USA. His writing honors in fiction include a Howard Foundation Award, a MacColl Johnson Fellowship and an Emerging Fiction Writer Award (for a novel) from New York University. Among others, he has won a 49th Parallel award and the Boudreaux Prize for poetry and been nominated for three Pushcart Awards. Poetry publications include Rhino, The Bellingham Review, 580 Split, Palooka, Witness, Tupelo Quarterly, and Nimrod. 

Carolyn King

Carolyn King lives on the Isle of Wight, where two of her poems are cast in bronze at Island landmarks and others are currently displayed at Freshwater’s ‘Dimbola Lodge’ as part of the 19th-century pioneer photographer Julia Margaret Cameron Exhibition. Carolyn was involved educationally for many years with language-impaired children and this is often reflected in her poetry. Since being short-listed for the Manchester Prize in 2013 she has taken first prizes in the Second Light annual competition and the ‘formal’ category of Poetry on the Lake, second prizes in the Thomas Gray Tercentenary, the Segora and the Sentinel annual poetry competitions and a number of other awards. 

Lindsay Means

Lindsay Means was born in California and lives in Brooklyn, New York. Winner of the 2015 Elinor Benedict Poetry Prize, she works as an editorial assistant at Riverhead Books. 

Laura Webb

Laura Webb was born in Birkenhead in 1985. In 2006 she won the Blackwell Publishing/ The Reader magazine ‘How to Write a Poem’ competition. She completed an MA in Creative Writing (Poetry) at the University of Manchester’s Centre for New Writing and a PhD on contemporary poetry at Sheffield University. Among other places, she has had poems published in CAST: The Poetry Business Book of New Contemporary Poets, Best Friends Forever, Poetry Ireland Review, The Manchester Review, Magma, Poems in Which, Poetry Wales, Stand, and The Rialto. She lives and works in London.

(in alphabetical order)

K. L. Boejden

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K. L. Boejden was born in South Korea, grew up in Denmark, studied in Paris, and now lives and works in Norway. He finds the arctic cold and darkness almost as inspiring as the cafés in Paris.

Jane Fraser

Jane Fraser lives in the small village of Llangennith, on the Gower peninsula, south Wales where she co-directs NB: Design, a design agency, by day and writes at every other opportunity. She has a Creative Writing MA from Swansea University and a PhD for a collection of short fiction entitled, The South Westerlies. She is a winner of the British Haiku Society and Genjuan International Prize for haibun. She has been a runner-up in the Rhys Davies Short Story Competition and Fish Memoir Prize, been longlisted once for the ABR Elizabeth Jolley Prize and seven times for the Manchester Fiction Prize.

Her work has been published in prize-winning anthologies including Accent and Momaya Press, and by New Welsh Review and The Lonely Crowd. She is grandmother to Megan 8, Florence 7 and Alice 3 who think it cool that, “Grandma’s been going to school to write stories”. 

Sakinah Hofler

Sakinah Hofler is a PhD candidate at the University of Cincinnati, where she is a Yates Fellow. In 2016, she was shortlisted for the Manchester Poetry Prize. She received her MFA from Florida State University, where she was a recipient of the Kingsbury Fellowship. Her work has appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Eunoia Review and Counterexample Poetics. A former chemical and quality engineer, she now spends her time teaching and writing fiction, screenplays, and poetry. 

P. F. Latham

Now in his 86th year, P. F. Latham grew up in the war and won his first prize for writing aged ten years and ten months (one is precise at that age). A reader all his life, he has been a soldier (briefly) a management consultant, director of a Housing corporation, and then Town Clerk at Stratford upon Avon. Currently he has a children’s story on offer to half a dozen literary agents and a love story to another set of agents. So far none has offered to take on either book. 

Hannah Vincent

Hannah Vincent began her writing life as a playwright after studying drama at the University of East Anglia. She worked as a child-minder to help fund her MA in Creative Writing at Kingston and is currently carrying out doctoral research in creative and critical writing at the University of Sussex. Her first novel Alarm Girl was published by Myriad Editions in 2014 and her second The Weaning – about a psychotic child-minder – is forthcoming from Salt in February 2018.

David Wakely

Raised in South London, Dave Wakely has worked as a musician, university administrator, poetry librarian, and editor in locations as disparate as Bucharest, Notting Hill and Milton Keynes. Currently a freelance copywriter/editor after completing a Creative Writing MA, he lives in Buckinghamshire with his civil partner and too many guitars. His short stories have appeared in Ambit, Best Gay Stories 2017, Chelsea Station, Fictive Dream, Glitterwolf, Holdfast, The Mechanics’ Institute Review, Prole, Shooter and Token. A poetry salon MC and one of the organisers of Milton Keynes Literature Festival.

Highly Commended

As well as short-listing six finalists for the Fiction Prize, the judges also chose to highly commend some further stories.

• Barclay Bradbury “The Interview”
• Dominic David Burgess “McFly”
• John Burns “Alberto Tomba and the List of Grievances”
• Dakota Canon “Little Earthquakes”
• Daniel Cordle “Surface Tension”
• Christina Craigo “Sharp Cheddar with Dijon on Rye”
• Helen de Burca “At the Border”
• Rachel Despicht “Memory”
• Tatiana Duvanova “Fast-Forward”
• Peter Ferris “Working for Mr. Rambridge”
• Clare Fielder “Services”
• Laura Foakes “Deep Time”
• Louise Goulding “Wild Mushroom Soup”
• Deborah Gregory “Silas in the Sea”
• Sarah Hegarty “Lucky”
• Finegan Kruckemeyer “Nests”
• Eamonn Lenihan “Our Little Secrets”
• Niall McArdle “The Joker’s Smile Cannot Stop the World Turning”
• Deirdre McAuley “Bruising”
• Niamh MacCade “To Memorise the Lark”
• Patrick McGuiness “A Place Where it’s Always Now”
• Fozia Mubarak “After Malala Was Educated…”
• Maia Nikitina “The Sea Creature”
• Alberto Nissim “Lost in the Depths of the Ocean”
• Michelle Redfern “Finding Treasure”
• Khadija Rouf “At the Lido”
• Elizabeth Chiles Shelburne “The Spacemen Them”
• Tracey Slaughter “some facts about her home town”
• Missy Smyth “Submerge”
• Trevor Syrett “The Tiger in the Cage”
• Natalia Theodoridou “All the Ophelias in My Flat”
• Maria Thomas “Lucky”
• Louise Tondeur “Falling”
• Peter Yeoh “Small Auntie”