With the buildup to our 2023 awards ceremony on October 14th continuing, it is an enormous pleasure to introduce 10 of the 20 writers who have been selected for this year’s shortlist and whose brilliant stories will be published in our 16th anthology – available to pre-order from Tangent Books.
The shortlisted writers are in the running for this year’s top prize which will be announced at the awards ceremony in 10 days-time. We’ll have more on the other 10 shortlisted writers later this week.
Jackie Bennett lives in East Anglia and is currently completing the MA in Writing Poetry with the Poetry School (London), affiliated to Newcastle University. Her work has appeared in Between the Lines, Newcastle’s postgraduate Creative Writing Anthology. She also writes plays, and her non-fiction book, The Writer’s Garden, will be published in autumn 2023.
Samyuktha Pritham Chakravarthy (Sam PC) is a writer and director based in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, who lives by the beach with her mother and daughter. She is currently the Head of Content at a leading film production company, YNOT Studios. Her play, ‘The Mobile Girls Koottam’ written with six women factory workers is currently touring with the support of India Foundation of Arts Bengaluru, Arts Practice Grant, made possible with the support of Sony Pictures Entertainment Fund. She is a two-time resident at the ASSITEJ Asian Artists Residency at Theatre Mindeulle, Republic of Korea.
Paul Bassett Davies began his career in experimental multimedia performance before creating a series of one-man stage shows. After that, he wrote for radio and television, focusing mainly on comedy. He’s made several short films, and wrote music videos for Ken Russell and Kate Bush, and he’s the author of four published novels and a collection of stories. Along the way he’s been a cab driver, a welder’s mate and the vocalist in a punk band.
Marie Gethins’ work has featured in NFFD Anthologies, Banshee, Fictive Dream, Pure Slush, FlashBack Fiction, Jellyfish Review, Litro, The Cormorant Broadsheet, Australian Book Review and others. Marie has been warded BAs in English Literature and Dramatic Art/Dance from U.C. Berkeley, an MSt in Creative Writing from the University of Oxford and a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Limerick. She has also been selected for Best Microfictions, BIFFY50, Best Small Fictions, she edits for flash ezine Splonk, and critiques for Oxford Flash Fiction Prize.
Emily Grabham is a queer writer and academic. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia. Her non-fiction has appeared in the Dublin Review. This is the first time one of her stories has been shortlisted for a prize. She wrote the first draft of her shortlisted story, A Familiar Mammal… at the rate of 100 words a day in 2019 during a long illness.
Sam Hacking is a writer and artist from Suffolk. In 2019 she won a place on Escalator Award for emerging writers at the National Centre for Writing in Norwich. In 2020 she was longlisted for UEA New Forms Award and in 2022 graduated with an MA with Distinction from the University of East Anglia. She is currently working on a collection of short stories and a novel, exploring various psychological disorders such as addiction, Pyromania, OCD, depression and PTSD. Artists and writers that have inspired her are Gregory Crewdson, George Shaw, Max Porter, Daisy Johnson and Chekhov.
Matt Hardcastle writes short stories and is working on perhaps, someday, maybe finishing his first novel. He’s never shared his work before but recently thought perhaps, maybe, it might be worth it. He runs a garden design business, gaining a good reputation and some fancy gold medal awards from the RHS for making pretty show gardens. He lives in South Yorkshire with his wife, kids, 2 dogs, 4 cats and Hector the hamster where they’re all chipping in and trying to renovate another 70’s house that perhaps, someday, maybe they’ll finish. Matt is extremely accident prone and has the scars to prove it.
Edward Hogan is from Derby. He has worked in libraries and colleges, and he is now a lecturer at the Open University. His novels include The Electric, and Blackmoor. Edward’s recent short stories have been longlisted for the Sunday Times Short Story Award, and shortlisted for the V.S. Pritchett Prize. His story, Single Sit, won the Galley Beggar Press Short Story Prize in 2021. He lives in Brighton.
Naledi Mashishi is a South African author and master’s student based in London. Her debut novel, Invisible Strings was published by Blackbird Books in 2021 and was longlisted for the 2022 Sunday Times Literary Fiction Prize in South Africa. It has recently been published in the UK by Legend Press. She holds journalism degrees from Rhodes University and the University of the Witwatersrand and in 2019 was the recipient of the Casa Lorde Writer’s Residency hosted by Blackbird Books and Eunice Ngogodo Own Voices Initiative. She has published short stories with African literary magazines Lolwe and AFREADA.
Okechi Okeke is a Nigerian writer whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Evergreen Review, Salt Hill Journal, PRISM international, Imbiza Journal, The Economist (an excerpt from his essay on climate change), Protean Magazine and elsewhere. He is a recipient of Iceland Writers Retreat Alumni Award, runner-up for Earl Lovelace Short Fiction Prize and finalist for Awele Creative Trust Award as well as K & L Prize for African Literature.
Congratulations to the shortlisted writers. We can’t wait to publish the anthology and help their wonderful writing find more readers. We’ll introduce the other 10 writers later this week.