Judges 2023 – Summer

Farhana Khalique is a writer, voiceover artist and teacher from south-west London, UK. Her writing appears in Tales from the City, Best Small Fictions 2022, 100 Voices, and more.

She’s been shortlisted for The Asian Writer Short Story Prize, and she’s a former Word Factory Apprentice. Farhana is also a submissions editor at SmokeLong Quarterly, a fiction editor at Litro magazine, and she’s taught workshops with Flash Fiction Festival, Retreat West, Dahlia Publishing and more. You can find her on Twitter and Instagram at @HanaKhalique and farhanakhalique.com.

Patrick McGuinness

Patrick McGuinness is a poet and novelist, and Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Oxford. His first novel, The Last Hundred Days (2011), was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award, the Writers Club First Novel Award. In French, it was shortlisted for both the Prix Médicis étranger and the Priz Fémina étranger, and won the Prix du Premier Roman étranger.

Other People’s Countries: A Journey into Memory (2014) won the Duff Cooper Prize and the Wales Book of the Year, and was shortlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize.  His latest novel, Throw me to the Wolves (2019), won the Royal Society of Literature’s Encore Award and was longlisted for the CWA Golden Dagger Award. He is the author of three books of poems, The Canals of Mars (2004) and Jilted City (2010) and Blood Feather (2023). He is the editor of the Penguin Book of French Short Stories (2022).