Nancy Campbell
Nancy Campbell is a poet whose delight in the radical potential of the book form has led to many innovative projects with small press publishers including essence press (Scotland) and Incline Press (England) and collaborations with book artists Sarah Bodman (UK) and Roni Gross (USA). Her first poetry collection, Disko Bay (Enitharmon, 2015) written during a research residency on climate crisis at Upernavik Museum in Greenland in 2010, led Carol Ann Duffy to describe her work as “deft, dangerous and dazzling.”
Nancy's decade-long hybrid creative response to the Earth's glacial regions was awarded the Royal Geographical Society Ness Award for environmental writing in 2020. As Canal Laureate (a project managed by The Poetry Society and the Canal & River Trust) Nancy's texts were installed along the UK's waterways where they could be seen projected on wharves at night and stencilled on towpaths; they are collected with other poems of place in the pamphlet Navigations (HappenStance, 2020). Her latest work considers queerness and the body, both in the prose poems of Uneasy Pieces (Guillemot Press, 2022) and the journal form in Thunderstone (Elliott & Thompson, 2022), a memoir of health and housing precarity, which won the 2023 TLS Ackerley Prize for biography. Horatio Clare describes the book as ‘a modern classic’ (The Week). Nancy has held numerous international research residencies, most recently as Visiting Professor of Literature at the Free University of Berlin. www.nancycampbell.co.uk
Irenosen Okojie
Irenosen Okojie is a Nigerian British author whose work pushes the boundaries of form, language and ideas. Her novel, Butterfly Fish, and short story collections, Speak Gigantular and Nudibranch, have won and been nominated for multiple awards. Her journalism has been featured in The New York Times, the Observer, the Guardian and the Huffington Post. She is a Contributing Editor for The White Review as well as And Other Stories. She co-presented the BBC's Turn Up for The Books podcast, alongside Simon Savidge and Bastille frontman Dan Smith. Her work has been optioned for the screen. She has also judged various literary prizes including the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Gordon Burn Prize, the BBC National Short Story Award and the Dublin Literary Award. She was a judge for the 2023 Women's Prize for Fiction. Formerly the Vice Chair of the Royal Society of Literature, she was awarded an MBE For Services to Literature in 2021. She is the director and founder of Black to the Future festival. Her new novel Curandera is published by Dialogue Books.
Kieran Yates
Kieran Yates is a London-based journalist, broadcaster and editor who writes about culture, technology and politics. She’s written everywhere from the Guardian, FADER, VICE, The Independent and beyond, had an acclaimed monthly column at VICE titled ‘British Values’, was nominated for Culture Writer of the Year in 2016 and regularly hosts events and panels discussing issues across music, politics, and news. Kieran contributed to the award-winning book of essays The Good Immigrant in 2017, where she wrote about ‘Going Home’. In 2015 she started a fanzine called ‘British Values’, a political satire and culture magazine that celebrates immigrant communities in the UK. She is the co-author of Generation Vexed: What the English Riots Didn’t Tell Us About Your Nation’s Youth published by Random House in 2011, and was part of the Guardian’s ‘My Favourite Album’ eBook in 2011 Kieran’s debut book about home and the housing crisis, All The Houses I’ve Lived In, was published in May 2023 by Simon & Schuster.
Prize Partner Judges
Joey Connolly grew up in Sheffield and now works in London as Director of Faber Academy. As a poet, he received an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors in 2012. His first collection, Long Pass, was published by Carcanet in 2017 and was one of The Poetry School's Books of the Year. His second collection, The Recycling, is forthcoming from the same publisher in May 2023.
Tessa Foley is the MA in Writing Poetry Manager at Poetry School. She has published two poetry collections, Chalet Between Thick Ears and What Sort of Bird are You? with Live Canon. She has also been published in several poetry magazines and prize anthologies.
Jack Hadley is Senior Courses Manager at Curtis Brown Creative. He worked as a reader and researcher at film/TV production company The Imaginarium Studios in Ealing, before joining the CBC team in September 2016.
Aki Schilz is the Director of The Literary Consultancy, the UK’s longest-running editorial consultancy. She is a Trustee of Poetry London, and sits on the advisory board of Penned in the Margins. Aki is a judge for the Bridport First Novel Award and sits on its steering committee. She is also a prize-winning writer of poetry and fiction, and co-founder of the Saboteur Award-shortlisted #LossLit digital literature project. In 2018 Aki was named as one of the FutureBook 40 (a list of the top 40 innovators in UK publishing), and nominated for an h100 Award for her #BookJobTransparency campaign and her work to improve representation and accessibility in the literature sector. She is also the founder of the Rebecca Swift Foundation, in memory of TLC’s founder and her boss and mentor. In 2019 Aki was shortlisted for the Kim Scott-Walwyn Prize.
Shortlist Judges
Creative Non-Fiction: Bethany Handley is an award-winning writer, poet and disability activist. She campaigns for Disabled people’s rights and for better access to nature for all, especially for Disabled people. Her work has been published by POETRY, Poetry Wales and Country Living, and featured by the Poetry Foundation, BBC Radio 4 and BBC Wales, amongst others. Bethany was one of the writers on Literature Wales’ Representing Wales 2023-4 and she was awarded Creative Future’s Gold Prize for Creative Non-fiction 2023. Bethany is an Ambassador for Country Living’s Access for All campaign, Ramblers Cymru and Wales Coast Path. She is co-editing the first bilingual anthology of Welsh Deaf and Disabled writers which will be published by Lucent Dreaming in January 2025 and her debut poetry pamphlet will be published by Seren in February 2025. She is currently working on her debut non-fiction book on access to nature.
Fiction: Iqbal Hussain’s debut novel, Northern Boy, was published in 2024 by Unbound Firsts. His short stories have won Gold Fiction in the Creative Future Writers’ Award, first prize in Writing magazine’s Grand Flash competition 2023 and also the 2023 Fowey Festival of Art and Literature. His stories appear in various anthologies and on sites including The Hopper, caughtbytheriver and The Willowherb Review. Iqbal was also a recipient of the inaugural London Writers’ Awards 2018.
Poetry: Oluwaseun (Seun) Olayiwola is a poet, critic, choreographer and performer based in London. He has been published by The Guardian, The Poetry Review, the Telegraph, the Times Literary Supplement and elsewhere. His debut collection is forthcoming from Fitzcarraldo Editions (UK) and Soft Skull Press (US).