Winners 2003

Maureen Almond

Since she began writing poetry Maureen Almond has published Hot, Tailor Tacks, Oyster Baby, The Works and Tongues in Trees. She has a strong interest in classical literature. Her work is included in the Primary Texts Reading List for the Oxford University Course, The Reception of Classical Literature in Twentieth-Century Poetry in English and has been cited in The Cambridge Companion to Horace. She recorded a programme about Horace for BBC Radio 3 as part of a series dealing with his poetry. She was a contributor to OUP Living Classics: Greece and Rome in Contemporary Poetry in English.

Bob Beagrie

Bob Beagrie is a poet, playwright and senior lecturer in creative writing at Teesside University. He has performed at numerous festivals and venues internationally, including The Royal Festival Hall; Theatre Royal Newcastle; Crossing Borders Festival, Amsterdam; Kiasma Museum of Modern Art, Helsinki; Down By The Laiturri Festival, Turku; The Haganum Festival, Den Haag; The Dylan Thomas Centre, Swansea; The Poets Café; Silvers, Portugal; and The Poetry Café, London. He has received commissions from Arts Council England, The Hydrogen Jukebox Cabaret of The Spoken Word, Redcar & Cleveland Borough Council and Hartlepool Borough Council, The Laing Gallery and Helsinki Refugee Centre. As well as collaborating with musicians, he has also worked closely with visual artists on public artworks and with theatre company Three Over Eden.

Publications include Huggin & Muninn (Biscuit Publishing, 2003), Endeavour: Newfound Notes (Biscuit Publishing, 2004), Perkele – a bi-lingual pamphlet with Kalle Niinikangas (Ek Zuban, 2006), Yoik (Cinnamon Press, 2008), The Seer Sung Husband (Smokestack Books, 2010), Glass Characters (Red Squirrel, 2011), and KIDS (Mudfog, 2012) a collaboratively written pamphlet with Andy Willoughby. His work has appeared in various anthologies and journals including The Forward Book of Poetry 2009, and has been translated into Urdu, Dutch, Finnish, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish.

Kitty Fitzgerald

Kitty Fitzgerald is the author of four novels: Marge, Snapdragons, Small Acts of Treachery and most recently Pigtopia, shortlisted for the Barnes & Noble Discover Award 2006. Her theatre work has been performed in eight productions for a variety of companies, including Cloud Nine Theatre, York Theatre Royal, Northern Stage, Live Theatre, Quondam Theatre and Durham Theatre Co. She has also had four dramas produced by BBC Radio 4.

She has edited two collections of short stories for IRON Press and has just edited a new anthology for them called Root, which will be published in spring 2013.

Kitty has recently been focussing on writing short fiction. She won the Notes from the Underground/Latitude Festival Short Story Competition in 2009, has been published by Shortfire Press and was commissioned in 2012 by NWN to write a story for their Platform anthology. IRON Press are publishing a collection of her short stories – Miranda’s Shadow – in June 2013.

She is an experienced lecturer in creative writing and has done many residencies. Kitty has had a Hawthornden Fellowship and several other writing awards, including a Time to Write Award, which enabled her to complete her novel, Pigtopia. She has recently been given a Hosking Houses Trust Writing Award.

Selected publications
Marge (Sheba)
Snapdragons (Brandon)
Small Acts of Treachery (Brandon)
Pigtopia (Faber)
Miranda’s Shadow (IRON Press, 2013)

John Murray

John Murray was born in West Cumbria and now lives in Brampton, near Carlisle. In 1984 he founded the prestigious fiction magazine Panurge, which he and David Almond edited until 1996. He has published a collection of stories, Pleasure, for which he received the Dylan Thomas Award in 1988, and nine critically acclaimed novels: Samarkand, Kin, Reiver Blues, John Dory, Jazz Etc, Murphy’s Favourite Channels, Radio Activity, A Gentleman’s Relish and The Legend of Liz and Joe.

John Dory won a Lakeland Book of the Year Award in 2002, and Jazz Etc. was longlisted for the Man-Booker Prize in 2003. His 2004 novel, Murphy’s Favourite Channels, was a Novel of the Week in the Daily Telegraph, and Radio Activity was the people’s choice in voting for the best Cumbrian novel ever. He received Northern Writers’ Awards from New Writing North in 2001 and 2003.

Peter Bromley

Avril Joy

Avril Joy’s short fiction has appeared in literary magazines and anthologies, including Victoria Hislop’s, The Story: Love, Loss & the Lives of Women: 100 Great Short Stories. Her work has been shortlisted in competitions including, the Bridport, the Manchester Prize for Fiction and The Raymond Carver Short Story Prize in the USA. In 2012 she won the inaugural Costa Short Story Award. Her short story collection Millie and Bird and Tales of Paradise is published by Iron Press. She is a short story tutor for Manchester based Comma Press. Her latest novel, Sometimes a River Song, is published by the women only Linen Press. It was longlisted for the Guardian’s, Not the Booker Prize and is a finalist in The People’s Book Prize 2017.

Online
Avril Joy
@JoyAvril

Janine Langley Wood

Marilyn Longstaff

Marilyn received a Northern Promise Award in 2003, and in 2005 completed her MA in Creative Writing at Newcastle University. In 2011 she was one of the three featured poets in New Writing North’s Read Regional campaign. She is published in a range of magazines and anthologies.

Marilyn Longstaff is the author of four poetry books:
Puritan Games (Vane Women Press, 2001)
Sitting Among the Hoppers (Arrowhead Press, 2004)
Raiment (Smokestack Books, 2010).

Her new book Articles of War was published by Smokestack Books in February 2017.

Online
Vane Women

Diane Simpson

Diane Simpson was born in Salford and grew up in North Yorkshire. She won a Northern Promise Award in 2003, a Royal Literary Fund Writers’ Pool bursary in 2005 and has an MA in creative writing from Lancaster University. Her short story, Isetnefret, set in ancient Egypt, was published in the journal of the Historical Novel Society, having won the Explore Prize. She is currently seeking a publisher for her first novel, The Sugar Accounts, set in Jamaica and England in the late 18th century and early 19th century. Her second novel, in progress, is set in Venice and England in the early years of the 19th century, and her third novel, in progress, is set in the present.

Peter J Walters

P J Walters was born in Birmingham sometime in the mid-sixties, but has been resident in the north of England since 1995. He was in the inaugural Creative Writing class at Bath Spa University (at that time Bath College of Higher Education) in 1988 and graduated with an MA in Creative Writing from Bretton Hall in 1997. He was the test case for the new Creative Writing PhD programme at the University of Sheffield (2010-2015) and graduated as Doctor of Literature (Creative Writing) in 2016. For ten years (2000-2010) he was the chair of the Wear Valley Writers, based in Bishop Auckland, and has chaired and hosted numerous literary events in the north east and elsewhere, including for the Durham Book Festival and the University of Sheffield. He is a research academic in the field of narratology and specialises in the nature of narrative structure in fiction and film, as well as the cognitive processes of text production. He is the author of a number of book reviews, short stories and two novels: Contracts (Waggledance Press, 2016) and The Route (Waggledance Press, 2017).

Joan Hewitt

Joan Hewitt’s first collection, Missing the Eclipse, was published by Cinnamon Press in May 2008. She loves giving readings and has performed twice at the Theatre Royal Newcastle, once with the Royal Shakespeare Company and with other regional poets. Venues include the universities of Newcastle, Northumbria and Teesside; North East libraries, Newcastle’s Blue Room; Colpitts Poetry, Durham; Dilston Castle; and Costa Poetry Café in Liverpool.

Her work has appeared in anthologies and magazines, and she has been placed in five national competitions, three of which were also international: the Ledbury, Sussex and Kent Open, and Mslexia. In 2003, she received the Andrew Waterhouse Award and a distinction in the MA in writing poetry from Newcastle university.

Two of her poems feature in The Body and the Book: Writings on Poetry and Sexuality and she has three in the Not a Muse world anthology of women poets, which features poets from 24 different countries. In the preface, poet, journalist, and short-story writer Laksi Pamuntjak refers to her poem Triangle in her discussion of the poetry of motherhood as a non-singular experience. She has a poem in 100 Island Poems of Great Britain and Ireland (Iron Press) and admitted to great pleasure at the alphabetical accident of her name being under Heaney’s in the list of authors.

Emma McGordon

Emma McGordon is a poet, workshop leader and performer. She was mentioned as one of the ‘12 young poets to watch’ by the Times On-line. In 2003, she was named Northern Young Writer of the Year.

She has been published in a number of magazines and anthologies and has two pamphlet collections. As a workshop leader she has worked with all ages and abilities in schools, community centres and prisons. She has also taught on the University of Cumbria’s BA creative writing course.

She has performed her work at many venues including Glastonbury festival, Latitude festival, Soho Theatre, Bloomsbury Theatre, Contact Theatre, Morden Tower, and many pubs, clubs and community centres in England plus one in Wales!