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Past Winners

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Sarah Brooks

Sarah Brooks (2021)

Sarah Brooks lives in Leeds, and is a member of the Leeds Writers' Circle and the Northern Short Story Festival Academy.

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Lucy Burke

Lucy Burke (2021)

Lucy is a writer for stage, screen and radio from Manchester. In 2016, her play Glitter Punch (published by Nick Hern Books) was shortlisted for the Bolton Octagon Top Five Season. It went on to have sell-out runs at the Edinburgh Fringe 2017 and London’s Vault Festival 2018, where it also won the People’s Choice Award.

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Susan Barker

Susan Barker (2020)

Susan Barker is the author of three novels. Her most recent book, The Incarnations (2014), is about a taxi driver in contemporary Beijing and interwoven with stories from other historical eras.

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Jane Bradley

Jane Bradley (2019)

Jane Bradley is a queer working-class writer and performer, based in Manchester. She has been longlisted for the Lucy Cavendish Prize for Fiction, a Young Enigma Award and the Mslexia YA Novel Competition.

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Penny Boxall

Penny Boxall (2019)

Penny Boxall grew up in Aberdeenshire and Yorkshire, and holds an MA with distinction from UEA. Ship of the Line, her debut collection, won the 2016 Edwin Morgan Poetry Award. Her new collection, Who Goes There?, is published by Valley Press.

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Sam Buchan-Watts

Sam Buchan-Watts (2019)

Sam Buchan-Watts has acted as Reviews Editor of Poetry London and is an editor of clinic press. His publications are Faber New Poets 15 and, with Lavinia Singer, Try To Be Better (Prototype, 2019), a creative-critical engagement with W. S. Graham.

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Adam Bennett-Lea

Adam Bennett-Lea (2019)

Since graduating from Liverpool Screen School’s Screenwriting MA, Adam has been a part of Royal Exchange Theatre’s Young Writers programme, had several scratch comedy productions staged regionally, and co-created the comic-book series Queer Tales.

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Victoria Bennett

Victoria Bennett (2002,2002,2020)

Victoria Bennett is a disabled writer, poet and producer, living with genetic haemochromatosis and hypermobile Ehlers Danlos Syndrome+. In 1999, she founded the radical-rural Wild Women Press collective and curates the #WildWomanWeb.

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Dite Bagdonaite

Dite Bagdonaite (2018)

Dite was born and raised in rural Lithuania, an appreciation of nature subsequently permeating her work. She moved to the UK at age 3, quickly picking up the language and developing a love for the written and spoken word. She lives in Liverpool and although she has been published in school magazines, the Cuckoo Young Writers Award was her first competitive venture.

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Allison Birt

Allison Birt (2018)

Allison Birt was born in 2000 and moved to Newcastle after growing up in Carlisle. She is currently studying A levels at Newcastle Sixth Form College, but in the future wants to persue a career in the arts.

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Edward Baker

Edward Baker (2018)

Edward Baker started his working life on a maggot farm and it was all downhill from there. Inspired by a remarkable drama teacher, he put pen to paper, in days when such existed and wrote a screenplay with a cast of thousands – mainly insects about said events – which won a development grant, and a C4 pilot that almost got the green light.

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Lucie Brownlee

Lucie Brownlee (2018)

Lucie Brownlee is a writer, researcher and creative-writing tutor. She lives in County Durham with her daughter and embarrassingly disobedient dog, Brucie. Her memoir, Life After You, was published in 2014 by Virgin Books. Currently under development with Ecosse films, it is a Sunday Times bestseller and was a Richard and Judy Autumn Book Club pick.

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Elizabeth Barrett

Elizabeth Barrett (2018)

Elizabeth Barrett's poems have been widely published in magazines and anthologies. Her collections include Walking on Tiptoe (Staple, 1998), The Bat Detector (Wrecking Ball Press, 2005) and A Dart of Green and Blue (Arc Publications, 2010).

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Laura Bui

Laura Bui (2017)

Laura Bui is an expat criminologist. Her research on developmental crime prevention has been published in scholarly journals in criminology and psychology. She is also the winner of Writing on the Wall’s 2017 Pulp Idol competition.

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Michael Brown

Michael Brown (2017)

Michael’s work has been published widely and he was selected for the Advanced Arvon by Carol Ann Duffy and Gillian Clarke in 2013. In 2014 he won the Untold London Competition with his poem, ‘From Hungerford Bridge, Looking East’.

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Clare Bell

Clare Bell (2017)

Working as a primary teacher specialising in literacy and text-based learning, Clare has led literacy in many schools and worked with literacy consultants on a range of different projects.

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Yvonne Battle-Felton

Yvonne Battle-Felton (2017)

Yvonne Battle-Felton is a writer, researcher, and lover of words currently based at Lancaster, UK where she has recently completed her Creative Writing PhD. She is a former Associate Lecturer at Lancaster University and is an Associate Professor at University of Maryland University College.

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Jude Brown

Jude Brown (2013)

Jude Brown has an MA in writing from Sheffield Hallam University, and has had a varied career to date, including working as a nurse, tutor, designer, and art therapist. Her fiction has appeared in several anthologies, and in 2011 she was longlisted for the Mslexia Novel Competition. Originally from Durham, she now lives in Sheffield.

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Kathleen Bainbridge Moran

Kathleen Bainbridge Moran (2015)

Kathleen Bainbridge Moran was the runner-up for the 2014 Flambard Prize. Her poems have been published in The Journal and The Rialto and her sequence, ‘Looking for Lorca’, for ‘The Poetics of the Archive’ project, appears on the Bloodaxe archive website. She completed an MA in Creative Writing at Newcastle University in 2013, graduating with distinction.

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David Borrott

David Borrott (2015)

David Borrott has an MA in Poetry from Manchester Metropolitan University. His pamphlet Porthole was published by smith|doorstop in June 2015. He lives with his partner and their three sons in Lancashire.

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Vik Banks

Vik Banks (2016)

Vik Banks cares about art and fighting exploitation and making time to do what gives you joy. Wrangling words is a joy-giver and she is trying to do more of it, experimenting with both adult and children’s fiction. Brave Enough is her first children’s novel.

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Deborah Buchan

Deborah Buchan (2016)

Deborah Buchan was born in Newcastle and now lives in Northumberland. Her working life began in Theatre-in-Education where she worked as an actor, director and writer. She has written a novel for young people which was informed by her work in hostels, refuge and residential care.

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Paul Bodie

Paul Bodie (2005)

Paul Bodie was born in Glasgow but has lived in Newcastle for the past 15 years. He won a Northern Promise Awards in 2005, which helped to support him develop his first novel, Mugs.

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Colette Bryce

Colette Bryce (2011)

Colette Bryce is the author of four poetry collections with Picador, including The Whole and Rain-domed Universe (2014). Selected Poems, drawing on all her books, is a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation 2017. Originally from Derry, N.Ireland, Colette has lived in the North East since 2005.

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Celia Bryce

Celia Bryce (2006)

Celia is a singer songwriter and won a Time to Write Award in 2006 which gave her some space to work on her young adult novel. This was published in 2013 by Bloomsbury. She lives in Tyneside.

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Chaz Brenchley

Chaz Brenchley (2005,2000)

Chaz Brenchley has been making a living as a writer since he was eighteen. He is the author of nine thrillers, most recently Shelter and two fantasy series, The Books of Outremer and Selling Water by the River. As Daniel Fox he has published a Chinese-based fantasy series, beginning with Dragon in Chains, as Ben Macallan, an urban fantasy, Desdæmona.

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Joanna Boulter

Joanna Boulter (2002)

Joanna Boulter's poetry has earned her a Tyrone Guthrie Fellowship from Northern Arts, a Northern Promise Award, and a Hawthornden Fellowship. Joanna’s first full-length poetry collection, Twenty Four Preludesand Fugues on Dmitri Shostakovich (Arc, 2006) takes the form of a long sequence based on the life of the Russian composer and was nominated for the Forward Best First Collection Prize in 2007.

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Bob Beagrie

Bob Beagrie (2003)

Bob Beagrie is a poet, playwright and senior lecturer in creative writing at Teesside University and has performed at numerous festivals and venues internationally. Publications include Huggin & Muninn, Endeavour: Newfound Notes, Yoik, The Seer Sung Husband, Glass Characters, and KIDS, a collaboratively written pamphlet with Andy Willoughby. His work has appeared in various anthologies and journals including The Forward Book of Poetry 2009.

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Peter Bennet

Peter Bennet (2011,2004)

Peter Bennet has published seven books of poetry and seven pamphlet collections. He has been a prize-winner in the National and the Arvon International poetry competitions and the Basil Bunting Awards. He was a Poetry Book Society Choice and shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2008.

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Niel Bushnell

Niel Bushnell (2011)

Niel Bushnell is a writer and artist from Hartlepool, Teesside. His first novel, a children’s fantasy adventure called Sorrowline, won a Northern Promise award at the Northern Writers Awards 2011. The award helped clinch a two-book publishing deal with Andersen Press for Sorrowline and its sequel, Timesmith. Rights to both have also been sold in Germany and Brazil.

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