As last year, the quality of entries was impressive. So many had winning qualities – compelling plots, brilliant characterisation, skilful crafting. Choosing the winner from so many excellent entries was no easy task but here, after much deliberation, rereading and discussion, are the choices of our expert and passionate selection panel.
1st place: Hereafter, by Julie Weary.
“Original, touching, sensitive, this chapter beguiles, beckoning you into the protagonist’s world and keeps you there with its compelling narrative and sharp observations. The characters are portrayed with honesty, the prose is clear and the wit of the narrator dry and perfectly measured”.
(Julie Weary from Wisconsin, USA earned an MFA in Fiction Writing from Bennington College. One of her stories won the Grand Prize in the annual Writer’s Digest Writing Competition).
2nd place: Skiv by Pamela Scobie
“authentic, vivid, moving, totally engaging… with a grim undercurrent”
3rd place: A Short Walk through a Wild World
by Douglas Westerbeke
“Powerfully intriguing, original, fascinating”
Short Listed Chapters:
A Girl Called Redemption - Sophie Neville A Light at the End of the Fjord - Karina Holm A Short Walk through a Wide World - Douglas Westerbeke Eat My Shadow - Linda Cockburn Hereafter - Julie Weary
Look Away - Faraaz Mahomed Skiv - Pamela Scobie
Long Listed Authors:
Alice Horncastle
David Goldstein
Didem Tali
Emile Palton
Helen E Crampton
Jacqueline Kowalczyk
Jen Millard
Jennifer McMahon
Jody Cooksley
Julia Wood
Juno Baker
Kasia Sedgwick
Kay McLoughliin
Pnina Shinebourne
Richard Salsbury
Roger Grant
Ronan Oshea
Stephanie Blaine
Stephen Gallagher
Thatcher Carter
Timothy Jay Smith
Tom Jensen
Yaara Lahav
Zachary James
Huge congratulations to all the short and long-listed writers.
Each of the chapters entered by these authors were deserving in their own way and our panel had an unenviably difficult job to select whittle them down the short list. So many of the entered chapters just missed, but each single one promised a novel we would have been happy to read.
