Winners
Jane Ayres – edible
Mark Lindsey – NEXT TO NOTHING and THIS WAS MEANT TO BE A STORY
Ashley Bullen-Cutting – Waterworks
Tim Murphy – YOUNG IN THE NIGHT GRASS
Shortlisted
Desmond Traynor – The Most Natural Thing In The World
Michael Mc Aloran – bone bite snare
Dave Drayton – BRITISH P(oe)Ms
Longlisted
Cormac Culkeen – The Boy with the Radio
Mike Ferguson – &there4
Moya Costello – pressed specimens. prose poems from the Southern Cross Plant Science Herbarium
BIOS
UK based neurodivergent writer Jane Ayres re-discovered poetry studying for a part-time Creative Writing MA at the University of Kent, which she completed in 2019 at the age of 57. She is fascinated by hybrid poetry/prose experimental forms and has work in many publications. In 2020, she was longlisted for the Rebecca Swift Foundation Women Poets’ Prize, and her poem Neurodivergent Cake Dream was nominated for Best of the Net 2021 by Streetcake.
Mark Lindsey was awarded his MA in Creative Writing from the University of Sheffield and is currently working on his first full collection of experimental, hybrid poetry. His writing uses prose poetry, poetic essays and collage to explore issues of fiction and truth, politics, history, misogyny, psychology and trauma. His research includes explorations of grief, the importance of the physical and its relation to truth in poetry and non-fiction and use of erasure as a method of exposure in the works of contemporary women poets. His work has been published in Pamenar Press Magazine and Route 57 and Mark is a founder member of the Sheffield-based writer’s group Cut Collective.
Ashley Bullen-Cutting is a writer whose work inhabits the liminal spaces between poetry and prose. His research and writing often concerns climate crisis and its effects on planetary populations. Some of his previous work can be found at MIROnline, Cauldron, and Perhappened Magazine, where he was nominated for Best of the Net 2020. He is a final year PhD Student at the University of Sheffield.
Tim Murphy was born in Cork and lives in Madrid. He has worked as an academic lawyer in the UK, France, Ireland, Iceland, Malaysia, and Spain. He is the author of three poetry chapbooks: Art Is the Answer (Yavanika Press, 2019), The Cacti Do Not Move (SurVision Books, 2019), and There Are Twelve Sides to Every Circle (If a Leaf Falls Press, 2021).
Desmond Traynor, Hennessey Literary Award winning short story writer, whose novel The Myth of Exile and Return was published in 2004 by Silenzio Press, and nominated for the Hughes & Hughes/Sunday Independent Irish Novel of the Year Award. He gained a Distinction in the M Phil in Creative Writing from Trinity College, Dublin, in 2000. He has taught courses in: Contemporary International Fiction and Poetry; Postcolonial Theory, Literature, Film and Music; Creative Writing; and Music and Popular Culture
Michael Mc Aloran was born in Belfast, (1976). He is the author of over 30 collections of poetry, prose poetry, aphorisms and prose. His most recent publications were with Editions du Cygne (FR), VoidFront Press (U.S), Veer Books, (U.K) & also by Infinity Land Press (U.K) & Oneiros Books (U.K). He lives, paints & breathes in Co. Clare.
Dave Drayton was an amateur banjo player, founding member of the Atterton Academy, and the author of E, UIO, A: a feghoot (Container), A pet per ably-faced kid (Stale Objects dePress), P(oe)Ms (Rabbit), Haiturograms (Stale Objects dePress) and Poetic Pentagons (Spacecraft Press).
Cormac Culkeen is a writer of poetry, fiction and short stories. He lives and works in Galway and is currently completing a BA Connect in Creative Writing in NUI Galway, returning to university full time as a mature student in 2018. His written work has been published in The Burning Bush, Skylight 47 and The Wild Word poetry magazines. He believes that writing should knock the air from a reader’s lungs, give them something to go into the world with or sit in their head like a waiting spider. Sometimes all three.
Mike Ferguson is an American permanently resident in the UK. Retired from teaching English, he presented and practised experimental writing with his students for 30 years. His most recent publications are the found prose poems The Lonesomest Sound (Knives Forks and Spoons Press, 2019), his truth-elusive vignettes And I Used to Sail Barges (The Red Ceilings Press, 2020), and a collection of poems about teaching Drawing on Previous Learning (Wrecking Ball Press, 2021).
Moya Costello has two collections of short creative prose and two short novels published (Kites in Jakarta, and Small Ecstasies; The Office as a Boat, and Harriet Chandler). She has critical and creative work in scholarly and literary journals and anthologies, and exhibition catalogues. She taught writing in the School of Arts and Social Sciences, Southern Cross University for nine years, and the School of Business and Tourism for five. She currently lives on the lands of the Punnilerpanna/Palawa people (north coast of Tasmania, Australia).
Beir Bua Press 