Past Winners

Lacey Williamson (2021)

Lacey Williamson is a 16-year-old poet from Barnsley. Writing has always been a form of therapy to her. For longer than she can remember, she’s always been drawn to reading books and writing short stories and poems. Lacey joined Barnsley Young Writers through Child & Adolescent Mental Health Services after struggling with ill mental health.

Dani Watson (2020)

Dani Watson is a writer based in Gateshead. She has always loved to write and has received support with her creative work through programmes such as The Writing Squad, BFI Film Academy, New Creatives and the Young Writers’ Talent Fund.

Katie Wilson (2020)

Katie Wilson is a young writer and fairly skilled daydreamer who attended Amble Young Writers for two years, where she discovered that writing can let her be as weird as she wants to be

Andrew Wilkinson (2020)

Andrew has been writing fiction since he attended a creative writing night class at his local high school 2008-2010. He went on to do the MA in Creative Writing at Northumbria University and graduated with a distinction in 2013. He is currently working on a novel about Gustav Mahler.

Charlotte Wetton (2019)

Charlotte Wetton is based in West Yorkshire. Her first pamphlet, I Refuse to Turn into a Hat-Stand, won the Michael Marks Awards 2017, following a spoken word album, Body Politic. She has been published in Poetry Wales, Staple, and Stand.

Ciah White (2019)

Ciah White is a young poet from South Yorkshire who attends Doncaster Young Writers. Ciah's involvement with the Hive network has allowed her to spend time writing and improve her poetry over the last year.

Melissa Wan (2019)

Melissa Wan (born 1991) is a writer from Manchester by way of Holland and Hong Kong. Her story ‘The Husband and the Wife Go to the Seaside’ was published by Bluemoose Books (2018) and will be reprinted in Salt’s Best British Stories 2019.

Shaun Wilson (2019,2021)

Shaun Wilson was born in 1980 and raised in Wigton, Cumbria. In 2018 his debut novel, a work-in-progress, made the final of the Penguin Random House WriteNow programme. In 2019 it won a TLC Northern Writers’ Award and an excerpt was published in Kit de Waal’s Common People anthology.

Georgie Woodhead (2018)

Rosa Walling-Wefelmeyer (2017)

Rosa Walling-Wefelmeyer’s poetry has appeared in, amongst other things, The American Aesthetic and The Minnesota Review and has been performed and commended at, for example, Durham Book Festival, Leeds University and the UK’s Young Poets’ Network. A small collection of Rosa’s work was long-listed for the 2016 Cinnamon Press Debut Poetry Collection Prize.

Peter J Walters (2003)

P J Walters is a writer and academic based in Weardale. He is the author of two novels and received a Northern Promise Award in 2003. Between 2000 and 2010 he was chair of the Wear Valley Writers and is currently an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Sheffield.

Benjamin Webster (2016)

Benjamin Webster grew up in a small village in the Lancashire countryside. Now living on the other side of the Pennines, Benjamin goes for long walks with his children in West Yorkshire, making up tales. Flea (A Fairytale of Sorts) is one such tale: a novel influenced by the countryside, the responsibilities of being a parent and the fact that no one ever really grows up.

Clare Weze (2016)

Clare Weze has been writing fiction for most of her life, starting as a child, and writes for both adults and children. Her work has been shortlisted for the Commonword Children’s Diversity Writing Prize, and her short fiction has appeared in several anthologies, including Gears of Brass (Curiosity Quills, 2014), Snowflakes (Bridge House Publishing, 2015) and Ghosts Cast No Shadows (Curiosity Quills, 2016).

Beverley Ward (2013)

Beverley Ward is a writing coach and consultant currently working for Sheffield’s Signposts Writing Project. At the 2013 Northern Writers’ Awards, she won the Andrea Badenoch Fiction Award worth £2,000 to support her to work on her novel for young adults, Straight on Till Morning.

Ben Wilkinson (2014)

Ben Wilkinson was born in Stafford in 1985, and now lives in Sheffield, South Yorkshire. He is the author of two pamphlets of poems: The Sparks (tall-lighthouse, 2008), and For Real (Smith|Doorstop, 2014), and winner of the Poetry Business Competition 2013-14, judged by Carol Ann Duffy. He is working on a sequence, Kopite Sonnets, commemorating the legendary players and managers of Liverpool Football Club.

Sharma Walfall (2015)

Sharma Walfall is a writer-actor from Manchester. She attended the University of Salford obtaining a BA (Hons) in Media and Performance. Sharma aims to be a thought-provoking writer, and says she loves to think outside the box and push boundaries.

Sarah Wray (2015)

Sarah is originally from Yorkshire but now lives in Newcastle and works as a technology writer and editor. After a few years of tentatively tinkering around the edges she is taking the plunge and working to finish her first novel.

Andrew Waterhouse (2000)

Andrew Waterhouse was born in Lincolnshire in 1958 and died in October 2001. He lived in Northumberland where he worked as a teacher and a freelance writer. He won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection in 2000 for In. A second volume, 2nd, featuring poems Andrew was gathering into a collection at the time of his death, was published in 2002.

Margaret Wilkinson (2000)

Margaret Wilkinson’s stage plays include Queen Bee; Thirty Minutes to Curtain, Herr Mahler; and Kaput, inspired by the short stories of Anton Chekhov and Raymond Carver. Her radio dramas, Out of the Ashes and Passover, were broadcast on BBC Radio 4; as were her afternoon dramas, Can You Hear Me? and I Decided to Kill My Brother-in-Law After Dinner. In 2012, she returned to North East theatres with modern gothic thriller Blue Boy.

Elizabeth Whyman (2007)

Having lived in Leeds for most of her life, Elizabeth Whyman moved to Newcastle in 1997. She is a graduate of the MA in creative writing at Northumbria University. In 2006 she was a finalist in the Cinnamon Press First Collection Award, had a poem commended in the Robert McLellan Award and won the inaugural Poetry Can First Collection competition. The collection, Touchpiece, was published in 2007.

Gavin Williams (2011)

Gavin Williams is an award-winning writer and film-maker based in Newcastle. His debut feature film, the dark sci-fi thriller, Await Further Instructions, starring David Bradley, (Harry Potter series), will be released in 2018. His short film, Sleepworking, which he wrote and directed, won eight awards and played at sixty international festivals.

Anna Woodford (2011,2001)

Anna Woodford is a poet, critic and teacher of creative writing based in Newcastle upon Tyne. Her poetry collection Birdhouse won the Crashaw Prize and was included in the Guardian’s round up of the best poetry books of the year.

Jane Wood (2012)

Jane Wood was born in Greater London, but has lived most of her life in Newcastle upon Tyne, where she works as a part-time proofreader. Her short stories have appeared in various publications, including Mslexia, Frogmore Papers, and The Nerve anthology (Virago). In 2012 she was awarded the Andrea Badenoch Fiction Award for her novel-in-progress, Michael.

Phoebe Walker (2012)

Phoebe Walker is originally from Northumberland and now works in London. She has twice been shortlisted for the Bridport Prize and her poetry and has appeared or is forthcoming in Magma, Lunar Poetry, The Missing Slate, CAKE, Cadaverine, and the Tower Poetry anthology, Earth Quiet.