Fiction prize 2019 shortlist

2019 Shortlist

Thank you to everyone who took part in the 2019 Prize. It was our biggest year yet and we were delighted with the standard of entries. It was a hard decision for the judges to make, but the seven shortlisted authors are as follows.

Louise Beere gained a first-class degree in Drama & Theatre Arts at Birmingham University before working as a theatre producer in the West End and for the National Theatre, most notably as General Manager for War Horse. After fifteen years in show business, she moved into the charity sector, working with First Story, a literacy charity committed to fostering creativity in young people through creative writing. She has been a member of both the Royal Court and Soho Theatre Young Writers programmes and joined City University’s Novel Studio in 2015, winning that year’s new writing prize. She currently works as a bookseller in the recently renovated 18th Century Piece Hall in Halifax, West Yorkshire, spending her days gazing at books and the wonderful Georgian architecture. Louise Beere: The Glove Maker of Spitalfields

Nicola Garrard is an English teacher and mother of three. Her experiences teaching teenage boys for fifteen years in an inner-city London comprehensive school informed the writing of Twenty-Nine Locks. She has dedicated her novel to the memory of her former student, Mahad Ali, who was brutally murdered by a gang in 2017 at the age of 18. She also writes poetry and was awarded a runner's up prize in the 2018 Poetry Book Society/Mslexia Poetry Competition, judged by Carol Ann Duffy.
Nicola Garrard: Twenty-Nine Locks.

Emma Hughes is a London-based freelance writer and editor, who's worked for Time Out, Wired, ES and others. She studied English at Gonville and Caius College, University of Cambridge, before being awarded a bursary to study for an MA in Creative Writing at the University of Manchester. In 2016 her short story 'The Match Factory' won The London Magazine Short Story Competition. 'Perfect Complex' is her first novel. She's on Twitter as @emmahdhughes.
Emma Hughes: Perfect Complex

Lucetta Johnson holds a PhD in nineteenth-century British art from the Courtauld Institute. Her research focuses on representations of the body, medical history, spatial theory, and the Victorian obsession with material culture. She has worked in the education department at Sir John Soane’s Museum and on exhibitions at Tate Britain and the Courtauld Gallery. From 2011, she lectured at the Courtauld Institute on nineteenth-century art, where she developed and taught a new MA course on the interrelationship between bodily and domestic interiors. Lucetta’s first novel – 1851 – draws on her keen interest in Victorian London. Lucetta lives in London with her husband, baby and dog.
Lucetta Johnson: 1851

Carly Reagon lives in South Wales and works part time as a lecturer in Cardiff University. Since the age of seven she has dreamt of becoming a novelist and completed the Curtis Brown Creative six month novel writing course in 2017 with Suzannah Dunn. Carly is a keen vegan cook, runner, singer, history-lover, and mother of two energetic children. Her first novel I’ll Find You is a ghost story inspired by her love of the Welsh countryside. It deals with themes of repeated histories, abuse and reconciliation, and moves between the present day and 1914. Carly completed degrees in theology and occupational therapy, and has a PhD in healthcare sciences.
Carly Reagon: I'll Find You

Sarah Brooks (winner 2019) completed her PhD on seventeenth century Chinese ghost stories, and now works in East Asian Studies at the University of Leeds. She attended the Clarion West Writers' Workshop in 2012, and has had stories published in magazines including Interzone, Strange Horizons, and Strix. She won the 2017 Bare Fiction Short Story Prize, and the Walter Swan Short Story Prize 2017-18. She's grateful for the exciting and supportive literary scene in Leeds, and is a member of the Leeds Writers' Circle and the Northern Short Story Festival Academy. She is co-editor of Samovar, a bilingual online magazine of translated speculative fiction. You can find her on Twitter @Sarah_L_Brooks.
Sarah Brooks: The Cautious Traveller’s Guide to the Wastelands

Sarah Marsh has spent the last ten years working for literacy charities, and in the arts sector. She has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia. She was born severely deaf and grew up using hearing aids and lip-reading to communicate. This inspired her interest in the lives of the deaf pupils taught by Alexander Graham Bell, and led to her writing her first novel, The Shape of his Words.
Sarah Marsh: The Shape of his Words

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