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MinK2025 - The Judges

Our MinK Creative Writing Competitions are judged by active practitioners - published writers working in the literary forms in which they are assessing your submissions. We're delighted to have the opportunity to work with them, hugely grateful to them for giving us their valuable time and insights, and pleased to have the chance to share their profiles and links to their work with you.

Flash Fiction

Jupiter Jones lives in Wales and writes short and flash fictions, which have been published by Aesthetica, Amphibia, Fish, Reflex Press, Ad Hoc Fiction, Mslexia, Parthian Books and rejected by many others.

She is the author of three novellas-in-flash, The Death and Life of Mrs Parker, Lovelace Flats, and Gull Shit Alley and Other Roads to Hell, and is currently working on a PhD at the Open University on the role of (dis)connectivity in the novella-in-flash.

Jupiter is taking part in our Online Programme in March 2024, talking to Charlotte Gordon about Historical Cancel Culture as part of our Free Speech and Literature series with the Open University.

More about Jupiter:

 

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Michael Stewart is the author of four novels: King Crow (winner of the Guardian’s Not-the-Booker Award, selected as a recommended read for World Book Night); Café AssassinIll Will: The Untold Story of Heathcliff (optioned by Kudos Films); Black Wood Women; two short story collections: Mr Jolly and Four Letter Words; two poetry collections: Couples and The Dogs; and a hybrid memoir: Walking the Invisible: Following in the Brontës’ Footsteps. He was written for theatre, radio and television.

 He is also the creator of the Brontë Stones project, four monumental stones situated in the landscape between the birthplace and the parsonage, inscribed with poems by Kate Bush, Carol Ann Duffy, Jeannette Winterson and Jackie Kay.

More about Michael: 

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Jupiter Jones
Michael Stewart

Poetry

 

Will Burns was born in London and lives in Buckinghamshire. He is the author of two poetry collections, Country Music and Natural Burial Ground, and one novel, The Paper Lantern, for which he was named as an Observer debut novelist of the year in 2022. He is a long-time contributor to the online nature-writing journal Caught by the River and an editor at Rough Trade Books.

More about Will:

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Hannah Copley is the author of Speculum  (Broken Sleep Books, 2021); and  Lapwing (Pavilion Poetry, LUP,  2024). The latter, which was a Poetry Book Society Summer 2024 Recommendation, won second prize in the 2024 Laurel Prize and was nominated for the 2024 T.S. Eliot Prize. Hannah is a poetry editor at the long-running literary magazine  Stand. She also runs a regular poetry night at the Soho Poly and is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Westminster.

More about Hannah: 

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Creative Non-Fiction

 

John Grindrod is a social historian of modern places. He is the author of Concretopia: A Journey Around the Rebuilding of Postwar BritainOutskirts: Living Life on the Edge of the Green Belt; and Iconicon: A Journey Around the Landmark Buildings of Contemporary Britain.  He is a resident of Milton Keynes.

As part of our Online Programme, John is in conversation with Simon Phipps for This Must Be The Place: a visual tour of Britain's modern places on 29 January 2025.

More about John: 

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Shanta Everington is a writer-researcher, specialising in experimental life writing. She is the author of Another Mother: Curating and Creating Voices of Adoption, Surrogacy and Egg Donation (Routledge), which uses hybrid form combining interview material and creative responses, and is currently working on Storying the Menopause: An Evocative Auto/ethnography, to be published by Routledge in 2026. Books also include socially engaged fiction, Marilyn and Me (Cinnamon Press) and XY (Red Telephone Books). Shanta has a PhD in Creative writing and is an Associate Lecturer and Honorary Research Associate at the Open University, and a Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellow.


More about Shanta:

 

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Will Burns (Photo (c)  Antonio Olmos for The Guardian )
Hannah Copley (photo (c) Nick Dennis)
John Grindrod
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