Shortlists

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Judges

• Chair of Judges

  

  Tom Holland

  Tom Holland is an award-winning historian and broadcaster. He has published seven works of non-fiction for adults – the latest being PAX: War and Peace in Rome’s Golden Age – and three aimed at young adults, the most recent, Wolf Girl, published in 2023. Holland has adapted Homer, Herodotus, Thucydides and Virgil for the BBC, and his translation of Herodotus was published in 2013. In 2007, the Classical Association Prize was awarded to Holland for ‘the individual who has done most to promote the study of the language, literature and civilisation of Ancient Greece and Rome’. He has made documentaries for both the BBC and Channel 4, presented Making History for Radio 4, and is the co-presenter, with Dominic Sandbrook, of the global hit podcast, The Rest Is History. In 2024 the Sandford St Martin Trustees’ Award was presented to Tom Holland.

• Poetry Judges

  

  Professor Deryn Rees-Jones

  Deryn Rees-Jones was born in Liverpool with family links to North Wales, and she later studied English at the University of Bangor, before completing a literature PhD at Birkbeck College, University of London. She is Professor of Poetry at the University of Liverpool. She won an Eric Gregory award in 1993 and The Memory Tray (Seren, 1995) was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Her other works are Signs Round a Dead Body (Seren, 1998), Quiver (Seren, 2004), and a groundbreaking critical study of twentieth-century women’s poetry, Consorting with Angels (Bloodaxe, 2005), which was published alongside her accompanying anthology Modern Women Poets (Bloodaxe, 2005). Deryn’s selected poems, What It’s Like to Be Alive, was published in 2016 and is a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation.

  In 2004 Deryn was named as one of Mslexia’s ‘top ten’ women poets of the decade, as well as being chosen as one of the Poetry Book Society’s Next Generation poets. Deryn has considerable experience as a poetry judge, including the National Poetry Competition, the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Costa Prize (Poetry) and every two years chairs the judging panel for the English Association’s Michael Murphy Poetry Prize for a best first collection of poetry.

  Deryn’s most recent book is Paula Rego: The Art of Story, the first full-length survey of one of the most distinctive and important modern artists. Her most recent books of poems are Erato (Seren 2019) shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and Welsh Book of the Year, and Hôtel Amour (Seren 2025). She is the editor of the award-winning Pavilion Poetry series for Liverpool University Press, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

  Read Deryn’s poem ‘Nightingale’ - a Guardian ‘Poem of the Month, from our own ‘Odes for John Keats’ volume.

  Her profile page at the University of Liverpool is here.

• 

  Will Kemp

  Will Kemp is a writer of poems, short stories and novels. He is Assistant Editor at Valley Press, teaches Creative Writing at York University and undertakes reviews for Dream Catcher and other magazines. He has won the Keats-Shelley Prize, Cinnamon Short Story Competition, Debut Collection Award, Cinnamon Pamphlet Competition and Envoi International. He has also been well-placed in many others.

  Will has had three full poetry collections published, as well as an award-winning pamphlet and 450 poems and short stories in leading journals such as: Aesthetica; The Guardian; The Interpreter’s House; Iota; Magma; The North; Orbis; Other Poetry; Poetry News; The Rialto; The SHOp; The Times.

  His debut short story collection, Surviving Larkin, was published recently by Valley Press. His fourth full poetry collection, In Another Life, will also be published shortly by Valley Press.

  He regards a commendation in the 2006 Keats-Shelley Prize as the turning point in his writing career since it spurred him on during a time of self-doubt.

• Essay Judges

  

  Professor Simon Bainbridge

  Professor Simon Bainbridge is a long-standing judge of the essay prizes. He teaches and writes at the University of Lancaster.

  His main research interest is in the relationship between the writing of the Romantic period and its historical context. He is the author of Napoleon and English Romanticism (Cambridge University Press, 1995), British Poetry and the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (Oxford University Press, 2003) and Mountaineering and British Romanticism: The Literary Cultures of Climbing, 1770 – 1836 (Oxford University Press, 2020) and the editor of Romanticism: A Sourcebook. He has published in journals such as Romanticism, Romanticism on the Net and The Byron Journal and has written essays and entries for An Oxford Companion to The Romantic Age: British Culture 1776-1832, Romanticism: An Oxford Guide, The Blackwell Companion to European Romanticism, and The Oxford Handbook of British Romanticism. He is a Trustee of the Wordsworth Trust and the Wordsworth Conference Foundation.

  Visit Simon’s profile page at the University of Lancaster here.

• 

  Professor Sharon Ruston

  Professor Sharon Ruston is a long-standing judge of essay prizes. She is Chair of Romanticism in the English Literature and Creative Writing department at the University of Lancaster.

  Her research specialism concerns the relations between the literature, science and medicine of the Romantic period, 1780-1820. She has published The Science of Life and Death in Frankenstein (2021), Creating Romanticism (2013), Romanticism: An Introduction (2010), and Shelley and Vitality (2005). She co-edited The Collected Letters of Sir Humphry Davy for Oxford University Press (2020) and led the AHRC-funded project to transcribe all of the Davy’s notebooks: wp.lancs.ac.uk/davynotebooks/

  Read a Q&A with Sharon and Professor Tim Fulford at the BARS Blog.

  Visit Sharon’s profile page at the University of Lancaster here.