Meet the Judges

Kathryn Aldridge-Morris

Kathryn Aldridge-Morris’ short form fiction and essays have been published widely in print and online literary journals, including the Aesthetica Creative Writing Annual, Pithead Chapel, Fractured Lit, The Four Faced Liar, Stanchion Magazine, New Flash Fiction Review, Leon Literary Review and Paris Lit Up, as well as being anthologised in over twenty print anthologies and broadcast on BBC Radio Sounds. She has won the Bath Flash Fiction Award, The Forge Literary Magazine’s Flash Nonfiction competition, the Manchester Writing School QuietManDave Prize, and Welsh publisher Lucent Dreaming’s Flash Fiction contest, and her work has been nominated for Best of the Net, Best Small Fictions and the Pushcart Prize. She is the recipient of an Arts Council England Award to write a novella.

Melanie Carvalho

Melanie Carvalho is a writer, artist and obituaries editor based in south London. Her story All Eyes On Me won the Leicester Writes 2024 prize and other stories have been shortlisted for the Brick Lane Bookshop Short Story competition, longlisted for Short Fiction ISP, and been Pushcart nominated. Her debut novel, Xim, set in 90s Goa and based on her own experience as a brown British woman, was longlisted for the inaugural Cheshire novel prize. She is an alumni of the London Library Emerging Writers’ Programme, and an excerpt from Xim appears in its anthology From the Silence of the Stacks: New Voices Rise Vol IV.