Judges
Sairish Hussain was born and brought up in Bradford, West Yorkshire. She studied English Language and Literature at the University of Huddersfield and progressed onto an MA in Creative Writing. Sairish completed her PhD in 2019 after being awarded the university's Vice-Chancellor's Scholarship. Her debut novel, The Family Tree, was shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award, and longlisted for the Authors' Club Best First Novel Award. She is now writing her second book.
Michael Donkor
Michael Donkor was born in London, to Ghanaian parents, and teaches English Literature in West London. Many of the issues explored in his debut Hold are close to his heart, and his writing won him a place on the Writers’ Centre Norwich's Inspires Scheme in 2014, where he received a year’s mentoring from Daniel Hahn. In 2018 he was named as one of The Observer's New Faces of Fiction, and this year Hold was longlisted for the International Dylan Thomas Prize and shortlisted for the Desmond Elliott Award.
Monique Roffey
Monique Roffey is an award winning Trinidadian born British writer of novels, essays, literary journalism and a memoir. Her most recent novel, The Mermaid of Black Conch, (Peepal Tree Press) won the Costa Book of the Year Award, 2020, and was nominated for seven major awards. The film rights were sold to Dorothy Street Pictures and will be developed by Film Four. Her other Caribbean novels, The White Woman on the Green Bicycle and House of Ashes have been nominated for major awards too (Costa, Orange, Encore etc). Archipelago won the OCM Bocas Award for Caribbean Literature in 2013. Her work has been translated into several languages. She is a co-founder of Writers Rebel within Extinction Rebellion. She is a Senior Lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University and a tutor for the National Writers Centre.
Cathryn Summerhayes
Cathryn is a literary agent at Curtis Brown. Having started her literary agency career there as an intern in 2004, she moved to WME where she established an eclectic list of clients over 10 years before returning to Curtis Brown in 2016. She has worked at a number of other British literary agencies and at Colman Getty PR – where she worked on a number of high profile book events including The Booker Prize. She was named The British Book Awards’ Literary Agent of the Year in 2019. Her clients include Adam Kay, Lucy Foley, Sandi Toksvig, Chris Whitaker, Anita Rani, Shappi Khorsandi, Ashley ‘Dotty’ Charles, Nicky Campbell, Mark Watson, Naomi Wood, Kirsty Logan, Susan Fletcher, Johanna Basford, Grace Dent, Sir Ranulph Fiennes, Deliciously Ella, Polpo’s Russell Norman, Catherine Mayer, Konnie Huq and Dr Shola Mos-Shogbamimu.
Lisa Milton
Lisa Milton is Executive Publisher HQ Stories as well as sitting on the Exec Committee of HarperCollinsUK. She joined HarperCollins in 2015 after a decade as Managing Director of Orion Publishing where she was responsible for Orion, Orion Children’s, Gollancz and Weidenfeld & Nicolson, which was awarded Imprint of the Year at the 2015 Bookseller Industry Awards. Whilst there she published major bestsellers and award winning authors including Maeve Binchy, Ian Rankin, Gillian Flynn and Malala Yousafzai. Previously Lisa was Editorial Director at BCA, the UK’s biggest book club, and prior to this she had a successful career at Waterstones, where one of her most notable achievements was opening the flagship store in Piccadilly and winning the Bookshop of the Year Industry Award in 2000.
Kit de Waal
Kit de Waal is an award-winning writer whose novels place ordinary people at the centre of the story. Her debut novel, My Name is Leon (2016), was the winner of the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year 2017 and shortlisted for the Desmond Elliot Prize and Costa Book Award. Kit’s second novel, The Trick to Time, was published in March 2018 and longlisted for The Women’s Prize. Her first YA novel, Becoming Dinah was published in 2019. She also crowdfunded Common People, an anthology of working class memoir by new and established writers published in May 2019.
