SWLF 2025 Judges' Reports
A big thank you to our judges. Their decisions weren’t easy, and their reports are insightful and definitely worth a read for anyone entering writing competitions.
Creative
Non-Fiction
Simon Whaley
I knew from the start this was going to be a challenge, so I wasn’t surprised when my initial longlist contained 26 entries.
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First, let me introduce you to a little secret when it comes to judging writing competitions. The first entry a judge reads is the one that sets the bar. Everything else afterwards is either better, or not quite as successful, or just as powerful. A writing competition is just that—a competition between the submitted entries. They have to fight it out between themselves, and let me tell you, it gets quite gladiatorial towards the end. For me, this is where spelling, punctuation, and grammar can deliver the final blows.
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You know you have a great batch of entries when you’re looking for reasons not to pass them through to the next round.
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I like my creative non-fiction to tell a story of some kind. It doesn’t need to be the whole story, but something needs to have happened between the start and the end that makes me feel that there’s been a change. The writer is in a different place at the end to where they were at the start. Often, such a change is an introspective one of greater understanding.
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One key concept of creative non-fiction is to write in scenes, and for there to be a scene, there needs to be action. It doesn’t need to be death-defying action. It could simply be a blade of grass fluttering in the wind. But what I want to discover is the importance of that fluttering grass blade.
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Another key concept of creative non-fiction is the personal element. Not only is creative non-fiction about telling true stories, it’s often about telling personal true stories. Frequently, this means recounting something from the first-person viewpoint, although not always. But when reading a piece of creative non-fiction, the writer’s voice should come always through. A piece of journalistic facts might meet the non-fiction test, but not the creative test.
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I read Gwyneth Box’s judging report from 2024, and I was interested in her comments about the same subjects cropping up. Like last year, there were babies and mountains in my pool of entries, too. I wondered if they were the same babies and mountains Gwyneth read. It doesn’t matter if they were. That’s the whole point of a competition. I’m not Gwyneth. I have different likes and tastes. What didn’t work for her might work for me and vice versa.
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There were also several pieces on breast cancer, lost loves, and grim childhoods. While these are all such moving, poignant pieces, when it comes to the final stages of judging, I prefer to have a pool of different themes to draw upon. The challenge at the longlisting and shortlisting stages is deciding which piece of the two tackling the same subject is worthy of going through. I find this agonising because the whole point of writing competitions is that entrants have no idea what else is being submitted.
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To be honest, any of the ten in my final longlist were worthy winners, and in another competition, they may well be.
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Choosing which of those ten should make it through to my shortlist of five was frustratingly difficult. Choosing a winner and a highly commended was even worse. It’s at this point I go for a walk. I often find the entries that appeal most to me are the ones I think about when strolling along my local footpaths. Sometimes it takes several days of strolling for my thoughts to clear. After a week, I finally felt comfortable about my decision.
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Highly Commended
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Autistic Joy
Stacey Warner
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Life can be such a battle, trying to work out how we fit into this world, or even whether we do. The opening scene to this piece conveyed such joy and marvel at something many people might seem quite insignificant. What I liked about this piece is its use of scenes to tell the story, albeit in a slightly non-chronological way. The opening scene is the end of the story, and what follows is a series of scenes that recount the journey to this point. These scenes explored the author’s pain of struggling to understand who they were, as well as the pains of forging relationships, because that’s what society expects. Well, that’s what society expects of normal people, whatever normal people are. Then comes the diagnosis, which in itself is two-sided. There’s joy in understanding the reason of why they are the way they are. But there’s also mourning: to mourn the loss of ever being like others in society. I particularly liked the way this was written in the third person. It emphasised the detachment between the writer and the wider society. But it ends on a positive note—back at the first scene where they allow themselves to enjoy what makes them happy because of the way they are, even if many in society don’t understand.
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Winner
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A Window Opens
Rachel Brook
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I enjoyed the window theme in this piece. Each window was a scene of a special moment in a relationship, and I, as the reader, felt slightly uncomfortable peering in to this blossoming relationship. But it wasn’t just a window on the story of a growing relationship. It was also a window into the writer’s coming to terms with who they are. As I said earlier, there needs to be a change between the start and the ending, and this piece conveyed a major coming to terms, and accepting of who they are and of the relationship. But it also raised another question in my mind: how does the other person feel about pulling back the curtains and letting others look in? That question can only be answered by that person, not the author, and this piece is the author’s story. This is their truth. Creative non-fiction is about conveying our truth, which may be different to everyone else’s. Even if it is, our truth is just as important as everyone else’s. We’re all unique, so our personal stories tell our unique truth. So this piece answer’s the important question in the writer’s mind. Daylight now shines on their truth where before it was kept in the shadows. Not only that, but they’re now proud to put their truth in that daylight.
Fiction
Gabrielle Mullarkey
What was I looking for?
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It was a pleasure and a privilege to read these stories. I appreciate the South Warwickshire Literary Festival asking me to do so.
There are a lot of sayings by writers both about the short story and the reader’s response to the form, and this quote, attributed to author George Saunders, strikes me as the most resonant: ‘when you read a short story, you come out a little more aware and a little more in love with the world around you.’
I can’t think of a finer summation of the form.
After reading the competition entries, I compiled an initial list of the final 50, pruning it down to 20, 10, and then the final five. Thematically and stylistically, many of the submitted stories were richly imaginative, reflecting the care and attention that had gone into crafting them.
Three key areas stood out during reading and re-reading: descriptive detail, scene setting and characterisation, often incorporating effective similes and metaphors.
Unlike a novel, of course, the most challenging aspect of writing a short story is creating a narrative arc with a recognisable beginning, middle and end. It’s no mean feat to accomplish this within 800 words.
Indeed, several stories contained wonderfully imaginative ideas that deserved elaboration in a longer format, bursting the banks of the word limit.
In some of the entries, description became repetitive, causing a loss of structural momentum and resulting in an extended scene rather than a complete narrative. This doesn’t mean that you have to divide your story into neatly apportioned thirds, but in the case of the competition entries, some stories started off at a gallop, only to run out of road, so that promising hooks tailed off into hurried denouements without any real payoff. Other stories ended where they could just as easily have begun.
That said, the best stories here left a tantalising, open-ended suggestiveness.
Also, while it’s true that an attentive reader loves to deep-dive into a story and work out what’s going on beneath its surface, some of the entries were opaque to the point of abstruseness. As a result, the reader had too much work to do, teasing out the meaning of a character’s internal thoughts, or else the writer was forced to resort to a lot of exposition and back story.
Thematically, many of the stories focused on loss (from the literal loss of a loved to loss of innocence) disappointment or the regrets of old age, the fragility of life and the risks of connecting with others. There was more than one character taking evasive manoeuvres or retreating into an alter ego behind disguise and make-up.
We had love and passion, murder and bloodlust, ghosts in many guises (both literal and characters haunted by the past), and the emancipatory impact of dancing. Many of these themes were handled with great sensitivity, insight and skill.
Structurally, the entries deployed a range of narrative points of view and yielded interesting techniques, such as using dates as a framing device, or anchoring sections with a repeated phrase.
The best entries evoked a range of emotions in the reader: for example, it’s possible to write a story on a dark, emotive topic that will raise a smile as well as anxious recognition. The best writing that we all enjoy as readers will evoke more than one emotional response, reflecting human complexity.
A few stories needed attention to spelling and the use of tenses. I didn’t discount any story that lacked a bit of polish in these areas, only stories where the syntax or grammar impeded my understanding significantly.
I’d just like to repeat what a privilege it was to read these stories and how hard it was to get down to a final five.
We all know how scary it is to send your work out into the world, so thank you to everyone who took the plunge and shared their writing with an audience.
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Commended
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The Tree of Knowledge​
The snake in the Garden of Eden is insecure because of its unpopularity, and also afraid of God’s wrath. This is not the sinuous, tempting serpent we’re accustomed to, taunting God by corrupting his apex creations. The serpent here sees itself as part of creation, already cursed in some respects, and reluctant to rock the boat. Eve’s musing on Adam are droll: ‘Once again Eve thought – he’s such an idiot. Ignorant, lazy, a slave to that ridiculous thing hanging between his legs.’ So much for Paradise. Was it lost from the very start? There’s a sly tone to the story – is the narrator blaming Eve for the Fall or suggesting that female frustration with male assertion of superiority spurred her into rebellion? According to Eve, even if women suffer and are blamed for the consequences of her act, women will always be in charge because men can’t think beyond their anatomy. Perhaps Eve, for all her apparent worldliness (evident before she bit into the fruit), is being slightly naïve here. Witty and a little bit subversive.
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Winner
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Nellie​
IA lovely character study packed with detail, ending in the indulgence of cream horns for tea (also a sop to Nellie’s husband Ted before she tells him she’s expecting another baby). The story has an effective staccato rhythm, while the detail allows the narrative arc to breathe and emerge. We get a jolt with the line, ‘Today worse than ever because I know there’s a bun in the oven.’ There’s a poignant sense here of a woman whose life options have gradually narrowed regaining a little of herself on ‘the sprung floor’ of the dance hall. Before her marriage and the responsibilities of domesticity and motherhood, Nellie loves to dance, her husband Ted watching from the side lines. Nellie, the first person narrator, fails to spot a warning about her future in her own assertion that Ted regards her love of dancing as ‘acting daft’ rather than an expression of free spiritedness. The story’s open-ended conclusion inspires both hope and anxiety on Nellie’s behalf, with the present tense deployed throughout hinting that possibilities may continue to open up, however straitened a life appears to be.
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Gabrielle Mullarkey
Poetry
Gwyneth Box
Well, that was fun: so many different voices, so many different topics, so many different styles and forms! And I was asked to make a longlist, then a shortlist and, finally, choose just one winner and one commended poem, so I got the chance to read and to taste and savour all these different flavours, decontextualised, with no explanations, no indication where they came from, what the story behind them was: a kind of blind poetry tasting.
The first thing I’d like to do is to thank everyone who entered the competition. Even if your poem wasn’t chosen, even if it fell at the first hurdle, that doesn’t mean it was a failure.
Competition poems are something very special. You’re not just competing with yourself, selecting your own best work to send. You’re competing with poems that others choose as their own best. Some of the pieces that were rejected were perfectly good poems. They might well find a place in a publication; they may belong in a collection of your own work. But I had a very specific remit: to choose a winner from the poems that were submitted. So your poem had to stand out from this specific crowd. And, while I was looking for good poetry, I also have my own preferences, so it had to appeal to me.
Of course it’s impossible to second guess what a judge is going to choose. But it is possible to check out their social media and their website and see if they say anything about their preferences or if there are any examples of their own work, which might give you some clues about what they’ll like. It isn’t hard to discover that my own writing has dabbled with mystic, domestic and natural themes, that I write free verse but can turn my hand to a sonnet or other traditional forms, and that I have lived between two cultures and two languages for much of my adult life.
The entries covered a wide range of forms, from formal sonnets, to free verse, to rhyming couplets, prose poems and beyond, and they covered a variety of themes, although there were a few that cropped up again and again: I was shown domestic moments and familiar activities: baking, knitting, fishing, and prayer rituals; an abundance of fruit: oranges and fallen apples; insects and birds – literal, mythical and metaphorical.
As I write this, I still don’t know who or where the entries came from, but it was a delight to see the mix of cultures and languages represented: images from Kenya, the Philippines, Bosnia, Gaza… tales of blending and binding, mapping borderless lands of a modern world. And in this mapping of a world in flux, the poems showed how we cling to the words of our ancestors, even when we write in a new tongue, and how we experiment with words picked from the strange new tongue although we write in our own.
It was relatively easy for me to dismiss the first hundred or so entries. Which isn’t to say the rejected poems had no merit. Most of them had something to offer, some had phrases and images that will stay with me for a long time. But often they simply weren’t consistent: they offered a highlight, a flash of brightness, and then the rest of the poem was mundane. They may well be publishable, but they weren’t competition winners.
One or two were rejected because of a single jarring typographic error. It’s hard to do this when the poem is otherwise excellent, but picking a competition winner is not the same as choosing for publication, when there is room for discussion and negotiation between the writer and an editor. A competition poem must arrive “entire and whole and perfect”.
Form and content need to be in harmony: working together they can strengthen meaning and create synergy, while the wrong form can weaken the whole poem. Comic rhyming pieces can sometimes be impactful and emotive, but when the metre trips, unless it is clearly deliberate and underlines the meaning, the whole piece fails. The same is true when natural word order has to be reversed for no reason. The omission of articles and pronouns may be a valid poetic device, but it can lead to obscurity: the technique needs to be used consistently, or at least logically, within a single poem.
A tender piece that immediate family members respond to with tears or with delight is not guaranteed to touch a stranger unless it has some more universal relevance. But however universally relevant the big subjects, such love, war and politics, these are notoriously hard to tackle, especially when there has been no time for distance and objectivity.
Some entries cried out to be read aloud, to be tasted and savoured. Some titles were intriguing, only to be let down by the poem that followed. Other poem titles were underused, seeming to be no more than a label. Some pieces sprawled across all 40 lines and made me wonder whether their line breaks were chosen to ensure they squeezed into the guidelines. Others took just eight or ten lines, pared to a minimum with careful, simple word choices.
The challenge for me as a judge was to look seriously and sympathetically at poems I instinctively didn’t like, for whatever personal reason – maybe subject matter, maybe style – but which I suspect are good poetry.
Even if it is intended to be read from the page and never to be performed, I strongly believe that poetry must “taste”good: sounds and meter should support meaning and any awkwardness should be deliberate. I read everything aloud and sifted carefully, eventually reducing the pile of paper to a longlist of eleven poems covering a range of forms and themes. While most of the pieces are free verse, there’s a sonnet, a prose poem and another with strong end rhyme that pulses with a clear iambic meter. They range in length from just 26 words spread over eight-lines, to 39 lines. There are couplets, quatrains and five-line stanzas.
The longlist also covers a range of subjects: lockdown, nature, religious, cultural and domestic rituals and customs. Anyone who is familiar with my writing will know that these are all themes that crop up time and again.
Now I had a longlist, it was very definitely a case of comparing and classifying the final pieces, and, as Jacci from SWLF can confirm, I sat over the longlist for a long time. I read and re-read each of them. I looked at the pieces on the page and tried to identify what it was that had attracted me and whether it held up alongside the other pieces. Eventually, five poems sifted to the top.
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Shortlist
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Normal (based on notes made during the Covid lockdown.)
Tony Hughes
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From the first time I read it, this piece stood out. The “lockdown-imagined beaches” of the first stanza, using the Happy Birthday song to time our handwashing… there were just enough glimpses of the normal domestic experience of 2020 that we could all recognise, set alongside the dedication of healthcare staff and the corruption of politicians and corporates. Yes, it’s a big subject, but the treatment was tangible, not abstract, and I found a wry humour underlying the bitterness, which is one of the advantages to be found with distance.
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Reverse Balikbayan
Ryan Caidic
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Having spent so much of my adult life away from my own home country, I found it easy to relate to this account of the care packages sent home by Filipinos working abroad – and, more specifically, of the care packages sent out to absent family members with foodstuffs that conjure home and community despite “ […] everything/ that Bratwurst and Brötchen/ made us forget. […]”. The use of Filipino words was essential, and just enough to season the effect without drowning the reader in the unfamiliar.
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Sloth
Christian Donovan
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A prose poem. A list poem. A single block of simple words and ideas that flow on from the opening “Happiness is when the windscreen wipers cease screaming because the rain has stopped.” These weren’t necessarily my images of happiness, but the ideas are clear and concrete enough for me to relate to them. And yet the reader can glimpse an undercurrent beneath the happiness, an acknowledgment that things might not always be that way. I felt a slight menace in the final sentence, “It is a two-toed sloth’s smile while he slow-scratches, and relief the tree still stands.” that challenged me to recognise these small moments and ignore them at my peril. Perhaps we should take the title as a warning against complacency and the sin of sloth.
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Commended
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Reasons The Goddess Persists In Her Pursuit of the National School Teacher Who Is The Pure Image Of Eamon De Valera
Michelle Dennehy
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This title immediately intrigued me and the layout reminded me of the anthems at the back of the church hymnal.The piece is almost a prose poem, with slashes used to punctuate the lines in a daring non-traditional presentation that forces the reader into a kind of chant or incantation. The opening “Three times / teacher / three times / I have circled / your flagstones / […]” evokes the voice of the witches from Macbeth, and the power of the Goddess flows through the whole poem.
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Winner
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Invasion
Tony Watts
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A hot night and all the windows are thrown open. Of course, then, the moths come in. And I can imagine doing exactly what the narrator does: “I stalked the house with a camera, snapping/ with journalistic fervour,/ documenting/ the alien invasion.” And with those photos, they identify the unknown species “in their silks and satins/ and powdered furs.” and then weave the wonderful names – “Buff Ermine, Blood Vein, Ruby Tiger –” and many others – through the poem. It’s a different kind of incantation from the previous piece, but again the effect is to create a strong clear voice and cast a kind of spell on the reader. Many of the named species are tiny and they live “in that parallel universe/ we call the night […]”, so we seldom get to see them close up or for any length of time. We would probably ignore them even if we came across them, but the poet has taken the time to look closely and given the narrator the words to share the experience. Thank you.