I’m an advertising creative director. My work has taken me all over the world from New Zealand and Australia to Asia and the Middle East. I’ve recently returned to the UK after four and a half years with Saatchi & Saatchi in Dubai. My short stories have appeared in a variety of publications and my play, The Ways of the Country, has been staged in Leeds. In 2004 my first novel, Thicker than Water, was short-listed, for the Fish Publishing, Best Unpublished Novel Prize. The Sleepwalker’s Introduction to Flight, was published by Macmillan in 2008 and by Pan and Grazanti. I’m currently doing an MSc in Creative Writing with the University of Edinburgh.

Tracy commented…

What an impressive feat of ventriloquism! Reading Resurrecting Bobby, I felt I was eavesdropping on genuine 19th-century grave robbers. I have no idea if the dialogue is accurate, but it feels right, and it is the author’s skilled prose that convinced me. I felt I was there in the rough and tumble streets of 1830s London. Grotesque, pathetic, yet with moments of poignant calm and welcome humour, this is a book I look forward to reading the rest of. It is a well-deserved winner.

Marianne Beyer grew up in Denmark and now lives in Amsterdam. She was shortlisted for the Fish Flash Fiction Prize in 2012. Cutpurse is her first novel. She is currently seeking an agent/publisher.

The YCAA says… Let battle commence between the agents/publishers as this novel needs to be read.

Tracy commented…

Perhaps it’s inevitable that I would be attracted to a story about a 17th-century Dutch painter who draws a young woman! But the anxious Rembrandt in earthy Amsterdam of Cutpurse couldn’t be more different from the refined Vermeer in quiet Delft of Girl with a Pearl Earring. The author sets out an enticing story of a young Danish woman pickpocketing her way into Amsterdam and her curious appeal to Rembrandt. The historical detail is extensive and deftly used, the characters well drawn, and the prose lucid.

Emily Midorikawa grew up in Yorkshire. She has an MA in creative writing from the University of East Anglia, and her work has appeared in publications including Aesthetica, Mslexia and The Times. She is delighted that her novel A Tiny Speck of Black and then Nothing has won third place in this year's Yeovil Literary Prize. Emily is a visiting writer for Circle of Missé, and teaches creative writing for City University London's Novel Studio and the Open University. She is represented by Ariella Feiner at United Agents. To find out more about Emily's writing and teaching work, visit www.emilymidorikawa.com.

Tracy commented…

This is an intriguing glimpse at the friction between Japanese society and the young Westerners who come to experience life there. Through Anna, the innocent abroad with a complicated past, we get to know the mysterious, tempting Loll and the dubious world of nightclub hostessing. Sprinkled with Japanese folk tales and accounts of awkward culture clashes, this was fascinating stuff.

The adventure of writing short stories can be a mixture of excitement, frustration, hard graft and elation. The last of these is to the fore when a story is acknowledged in any way, whether it is round the table amongst fellow writers or with commendation in a writing competition.
Gaining acknowledgement in the annual Yeovil Literary Prize, knowing the competition has been many and international, is icing on the cake, a helpful spur to keep writing every day whatever else is happening around you.
Much hard work is put into the running of literary competitions by many people and I would like to record thanks on behalf of all entrants for the time and energy that lies behind this ever more prominent competition.

Julia commented…

A really touching snapshot. An old man, who after decades away from his home town, bumps into the woman he loved from a distance when he was a boy. They’d never spoken, but now, years later, when she’s suffering from dementia, we glimpse that she loved him too. I couldn’t help wonder another story, the story of what could have been, if he’d been able to tell her how he felt so many years before.

For many years, Janet taught English in the south of England mainly to military personnel from the Middle East and Francophone Africa. She has had several short stories Highly Commended in competitions. In April 2012, Memory was published in Dorset Voices, an anthology of prose and poetry by writers living in the county. In November 2012, New was 2nd prize winner in the Balsall Writers Competition. Janet is working on a novel set in Russia and England in the early 20th century, of which the opening chapter and a 500-word synopsis won 1st prize at the 2011 Winchester Writers’ Conference. Janet reviews for the Historical Novel Society and is a member of Wessex Christian Writers. She is a choral singer, belongs to West Moors reading group and was part of the successful campaign to retain the library there. She cares for her husband and has become gardener-in-chief - they grow a lot of their own produce. Janet says: being a prize winner at Yeovil is such a tremendous encouragement and affirmation, the realisation that somebody, several people, have said ‘Yes’. Thank you!

Julia Commented…

This is the story of two 17 year olds who fall in love, and can't be together 'til decades later, when their lives have pulled them in different directions, her to work in Africa, and he in prison for GBH. There's a real love of language and the right word.

Elizabeth told us… “ Many years ago, when I had the privilege of studying at the University of Reading, all Freshers were required to take and pass three subjects in their first year before making their final degree choice. I chose History over English Lit or Archaeology.

So I have spent thirty-five years wondering ‘What if?’ while spending every spare moment immersed in fiction; mopping up stories. I have absorbed them like one of those super thirsty kitchen towels. From Angela Carter to Yevgeny Zamyatin: the weirder the better.

Julia Commented…

A husband and wife have dinner, and when he goes up to bed, she potters, trying not to be anxious but waiting for her son, who's just passed his test and is driving home from an evening with his friends. It's a quiet, resonant and thoughtful look at motherhood and marriage.

This is Kiran Millwood Hargrave’s first poetry competition win. Kiran was born in London in 1990. She is currently undertaking an MSt at Oxford University, and is President of the Oxford University Poetry Society. Her work has been selected to appear in magazines such as Magma, Other Poetry, The Cadaverine and Orbis. She was recently a featured poet in Agenda. This year, she was offered a Literary Arts Residency at the Banff Centre, Canada, and was Poet-in-Residence for the Expansionists Project in May. Her poem Estuary was selected by John Burnside for his Masterclass at St Anza 2013. Kiran’s third collection Splitfish is forthcoming from Gatehouse Press in late September. www.kiranmh.co.uk

Neil commented…

'Grace' is a remarkable poem about being with a loved one at the precise moment of that person's death. I think the poem says it all, so there's not much I can add to it, except that I think the way the poem moves from couplet to couplet and through its alternating indented lines, all help its beautifully phrased enactment of the last moments experienced between two human beings during which nothing is spoken but all is said through touch and sight. The poem slows down what must have happened in seconds into something which unfolds and closes, word by word, phrase by phrase, line by line, couplet by couplet, on the page.

I was born and grew up in the Isle of Man. I now live in Somerset and work as a counsellor. An interest in human psychology and a wish to find words and structures to capture experience, especially for some of the dark edges of life, is my main motivation for writing. I have been writing and reading poetry most of my life. A collection, Days of Fire and Flood (original plus) was published in 2005 and my poems have appeared in many magazines, most recently the Rialto and Obsessed with Pipework, and in anthologies The Captain’s Tower: Seventy Poets Celebrate Bob Dylan at Seventy (Seren 2012) and The Listening Walk (CreateSpace, June 2013).

Neil commented…

Only after choosing 'The Waves' as my second prize winner did I discover from the codes on the sheets that another poem, a highly accomplished and moving sestina called 'Don't Look Now', which I would have wanted as a joint third prize winner, was by the same poet (the competition rules only allow for one prize per poet). This added to my admiration of this poet's technical skills and ability to marry feeling with form in a way which intensifies and draws out the experiences being evoked. 'The Waves' is an urban poem in which people's precariously lurching lives in the city are written about as though swept and buffeted by sea and storm. The metaphor of the waves as the rhythm of life permeates the whole poem in such a way that the reader isn't always aware that the sea carries all before it.

Now in my sixties and with children grown up, I am finding more time to indulge in my life-long obsession with words.

After writing mostly short stories for four years, I caught a serious ‘poetry bug’ and started to attend classes run by Clare Pollard. I’m thrilled to have won this prize, because I still feel very much a novice who has a lot to learn. This is my second specular poem; I greatly admire how Julia Copus uses the form, and am a fan of all her work.

I have taught English as a foreign language, but for over 30 years my main occupation has been piano teaching. I am particularly drawn to musical aspects of poetry.

Neil commented…

'With Hindsight' uses the 'specular' poem form invented by Julia Copus ‘where the second half unfolds mirror-like from the first, using the same lines but in reverse order. The result of this discipline should be no more mechanical than a good sonnet or fugue' (her note). She wrote of 'The Back Seat of My Mother's Car' and another specular poem about familial love that the form ‘echoes the way my mind remembered these two traumas at the time of writing, replaying events until the precise sequence of them became obscured’. She has since written a number of other specular poems, and other poets have also tried using her form, which here is handled so deftly that I had to wonder if this poem might even be Copus's work (she does after all live in Somerset). But if it isn't Copus's poem, this similarly inventive/reflective writer has also chosen to use the specular form in the very way she made it work in her poems, with the pivotal switch in the middle being an emotional turning-point after which the unravelling, or re-ravelling, plays the scene back to the beginning, so that the end and the beginning are one. For the specular form to work at its best, the line endings should work in such a way that the each line break changes the meaning of what follows differently in the second half of the poem from how the same line break works in reverse in the first half, where it leads to a different line, and 'With Hindsight' does that beautifully.