IRENOSEN OKOJIE – Short Fiction/University of Essex International Short Story Prize 2021 main judge

"Through all this was a real love of language and what you can do with it. It fascinates me how I can interrogate language, how I can stretch it and push it and what I can do with it. Particularly imagery. A lot of my stories start with images..."

NAOMI BOOTH – Short Fiction/University of Essex International Wild Writing Prize 2021 judge

"The challenge, I think, is not to reduce this to a trope—but to attempt to create work that radically refigures the ways we’ve conceived of the relationship between humankind and the environment..."

JAMES CANTON – Short Fiction/University of Essex International Wild Writing Prize 2021 judge

"Some of my research involved sitting beside an eight-hundred-year old oak tree for many hours and in many weathers..."

AILSA COX

"What I think this teaches us is that distraction, gossip, fragments of experience, digressions and byways are the makings of fiction..."

STEVEN MILLHAUSER

"Every time I answer a question I glance out the window to check the snow, and I see that there's exactly the same amount, always. I believe that special employees of the town are hired to work through the night, spreading snow so that it remains at the same height for six months."

ALISON MACLEOD

"You can look at your story, test every seam of its world, and see that you've made a beautiful thing."

PHILLIP O'CEALLAIGH

"Stories are a basic human need. Not in the sense that food is, we don't need them to keep our hearts beating. But in the sense that as long as our hearts are beating we need to hear them, and there will be people called upon to make them."

MICHÈLE ROBERTS

"Like those compressed japanese paper flowers you drop into a glass of water and watch unfurl and bloom."

GRAHAM MORT

"The story occupies that place between waking and dreaming, which gives it an especially hypnotic presence..."

CHARLES LAMBERT

"A true plainness resonates differently from the kind of language that draws attention to itself..."

ALISON MOORE

"A resonant short story is a beautiful and exciting thing..."