Our 2025 Yeovil Literary Prize Judges are…

Alison is a senior industry-respected PR publishing professional, with over thirty years’ experience in UK book publishing. She has won multiple industry awards for her publicity campaigns which include Paula Hawkins’ The Girl on the Train, Bonnie Garmus’ Lessons in Chemistry and The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown. She is publicist also for critically acclaimed bestselling and award-winning novelists Kate Atkinson, Rachel Joyce, Ruth Jones and for local novelist Nikki May, amongst others.

Alison is Deputy Chair of The Women's Prize, the globally recognised prestigious literary award and charity and reads voraciously across all genres, fiction and non-fiction.

Born in Bristol and raised in Lagos, Nikki May is Anglo-Nigerian. Her critically acclaimed debut novel Wahala won the Comedy Women in Print New Voice Prize, was shortlisted for the Diverse Book Award and the Fingerprint Debut of the Year Award, as well as the Yeovil Literary Prize, and longlisted for the Goldsboro Glass Bell Award. It’s being turned into a major BBC TV drama series.

This Motherless Land is her second novel.

Nikki lives in Dorset with her husband, two standard Schnauzers and way too many books. She should be working on her next book but is probably reading.

James has always been fascinated by poetry, the sounds and images which poetry invokes as well as its innate ability to convey coded messages between the lines.

A craft and an art that holds our subconscious together as well as describing the emotions of everyday life, from the kitchen sink to the western Desert or jungles of Burma. From Anglo Saxon to Rap.

From sonnet to blank verse, words have a power beyond their time.

Ele Fountain worked as an editor in children’s publishing where she was responsible for launching and nurturing the careers of many prize-winning and bestselling authors.

She lived in Addis Ababa for several years, where she wrote her debut novel, Boy 87, which went on to win four awards and was nominated for ten more, including the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize and Carnegie Medal. Her second novel, Lost, was a Guardian Children’s Book of the Year. Fake has been selected as a Book Trust Future Classic. Wild was a Financial Times Best Book of the Year. Her latest novel, Storm Child, was a Times Book of the Week.

She has written for The Telegraph, Scoop, Book Trust, and talked about her books and reading on Woman’s Hour, BBC Radio London, BBC Radio Scotland, BBC World Service, and to anyone who happens to be passing. Ele currently holds a post as RLF Fellow at University of Reading.

Sarah is a writer of fiction and non-fiction. The Yeovil Literary Prize holds a special place in her heart – her work won the Novel category in 2010 and 2014. That success encouraged her to keep going; her short fiction has been published in literary magazines and anthologies, and her debut collection Magpie and Other Stories has just been published by Troubador. She lives in Surrey, where she teaches creative writing, and is working on a novel.

Sarah loves being immersed in different worlds, and the poetic possibilities of language. She is excited to be judging Writing Without Restrictions and looks forward to being invited into your imagination!