Description
The Bridport Prize, established in 1973, is one of the most prestigious open writing competitions in the English language with over £18,000 in prize money annually.
This exciting collection of new writing contains the winning poems, short stories and flash fiction stories from the 2024 Bridport Prize competition selected by judges:
Liz Berry • Poetry
Wendy Erskine • Short Stories
Jasmine Sawers • Flash Fiction
About the judges
Liz Berry is an award-winning poet and author of the critically acclaimed collections Black Country (Chatto, 2014); The Republic of Motherhood (Chatto, 2018); The Dereliction (Hercules Editions, 2021) and The Home Child (Chatto, 2023), a novel in verse. Liz’s work, described as “a sooty soaring hymn to her native West Midlands” (Guardian), celebrates the landscape, history and dialect of the region. Liz has received the Somerset Maugham Award, Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and Forward Prizes. Her poem ‘Homing’, a love poem for the language of the Black Country, is part of the GCSE English syllabus.
Wendy Erskine’s two short story collections Sweet Home and Dance Move are published by The Stinging Fly Press and Picador. For Paper Visual Art Books she edited well I just kind of like it, an anthology of writing on art in the home and the home as art. Her writing on art, music and books has appeared widely and she is a regular interviewer and broadcaster. She hosts a radio show on Soho Radio for Rough Trade Books. In 2021 she was Seamus Heaney Fellow at Queen’s University Belfast and in 2023 she became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She is a full-time secondary school teacher.
Jasmine Sawers is a Kundiman fellow and Indiana University MFA alum. Their work has won awards from Ploughshares, NANO Fiction, Fractured Lit, and Press 53, and has appeared in such journals and anthologies as Norton’s Flash Fiction America, Best Microfiction, SmokeLong Quarterly, and Wigleaf. Their book, The Anchored World, was a finalist for the 2023 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection. Originally from Buffalo, Sawers now lives outside St. Louis.
