2018 Fiction Prize shortlist
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Deepa Anappara (2018 winner) is currently doing a PhD in Creative-Critical Writing at the University of East Anglia, Norwich. She has a Masters in Creative Writing (Prose Fiction) from UEA and previously worked as a journalist and editor in India. Her short fiction has won: the Dastaan Award, the Asian Writer Short Story Prize, the second prize in the Bristol Short Story awards and the third prize in the Asham awards. Her reports on education and human rights, published in newspapers and magazines in India, have won the Developing Asia Journalism awards, Every Human has Rights Media awards, and the Prabha Dutt Fellowship in Journalism. Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line also won the Bridport/Peggy Chapman-Andrews Award for First Novel in 2017 and was published in 2020 by Penguin. The novel was also shortlisted for the 2020 JCB Prize and long-listed for the 2020 Women's Prize for Fiction.
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Angela Dove was born and raised in Yorkshire and graduated in Theatre Design from Wimbledon School of Art and subsequently in Acting from Central School of Speech and Drama. After a sixteen - year career in the theatre and with the BBC, she now teaches at City University, London, where she is a Learning Fellow. Her writing career began as a poet. She has been published in, amongst others, Poetry Review, Magma, Poetry London, and highly commended twice for The Bridport Prize. She founded and ran a nine-year sustained series of poetry events: Cats Night Out, promoting established and emerging women poets, at the Poetry Society and Voice Box, South Bank. Angela began developing ideas for For One Night Only during the Certificate in Novel Writing course at City University. It is her first novel.
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Carol Farrelly is a writer based in Edinburgh. She is working on her novel This Starling Flock, set in ‘Emergency’ Ireland and WWII Cornwall, and her short-story collection, Holdfast. Her short stories have been widely published in journals, including The Irish Times, Stand, Edinburgh Review, New Writing Scotland and Lampeter Review, and broadcast on BBC Radio 4. Her story The Telephone Man won the international Lorian Hemingway Short Story Prize. Other stories have been shortlisted for the Bridport Prize, Fish Prize and RA & Pin Drop Short Story Award. In 2015 she was awarded a place on the Jerwood/Arvon Mentoring Scheme. She has also received a Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship and a Scottish Book Trust New Writer's Award. She holds a DPhil on Thomas Hardy, who remains her Desert Island writer. Follow her @CarolMFarrelly
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Victoria Richards is a journalist and writer who has worked for the BBC, The Times and The Independent. In 2017/18 she was highly commended in the Bridport Prize, came third in The London Magazine short story competition and second in the TSS international flash fiction competition. She was also longlisted in the Bath Short Story Award, the Times/Chicken House Children’s Fiction Competition and the National Poetry Competition. She is a graduate of the MA in Creative Writing at Birkbeck, University of London, which she passed with distinction. She is also a co-founder of The Second Source, set up by a group of female journalists to tackle sexual harassment in the media. www.twitter.com/nakedvix
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Poppy Sebag-Montefiore lived in China for five years between 1999 and 2007. She worked in the BBC’s Beijing Bureau as a news producer and a culture and arts reporter. She then set up her own production company making documentaries about China for international broadcasters, and also worked as the China correspondent for Channel4 News. Poppy speaks and reads Mandarin fluently which she studied at Tsinghua University, Beijing. She currently teaches seminars on Modern Chinese Fiction at Kings College London and Kingston University. Since returning from China, Poppy has worked as a journalist and filmmaker across BBC News and Current Affairs. At Newsnight she focused on investigations into social issues in Britain. As a journalist Poppy often felt there was more to report than what the form of journalism would allow, and so she began work on a novel, Listeners. She was awarded the Malcolm Bradbury Scholarship to study an MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia (2013-2014). Listeners is set in a fictional place - which does resemble, in many ways, the capital city of a certain emerging superpower.
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Lauren Van Schaik is an American and British writer. In 2016 she completed an MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, where she was awarded the David Higham Scholarship. Her short story ’Terre Haute’ was shortlisted for The White Review Short Story Prize in 2017 and in 2014-15 she was mentored through the Writers’ Centre Norwich Inspires scheme. Her first novel, Joplin, is a re-envisioning of the Bonnie and Clyde legend that grapples with virginity and female friendships; with seduction and religious indoctrination; with mothers, absent, surrogate, imagined, and awful; and ultimately with what makes a young woman surrender everything for a crime spree. Lauren studied history at Bryn Mawr College, Oxford, and UCL. She was born in Missouri, grew up in Ohio, and now lives and works in London.