Short Story Winner - Amy Stewart

Click here to read Amy's winning work, Big Breath.

Amy Stewart is a writer living in the Scottish Borders. She has an MA in Creative Writing from York St John University, graduating with a Distinction and the Programme Prize, and is currently studying for a Creative Writing PhD at the University of Sheffield.

Her work appears in Test Signal, an anthology of new northern writing from Dead Ink Books and Bloomsbury, as well as a number of journals. She has also been highly commended and shortlisted in the Bridport and Mairtín Crawford Prizes. In 2021, she won the New Writing North & Word Factory Northern Apprentice Award and in 2022, won the Mairtín Crawford Prize for Short Story.

Amy is currently working on her debut short story collection, which examines how folklore and myth can be used to explore the issues women face today and uses speculative concepts to destabilise the familiar. She is represented by Marilia Savvides at 42. 

Joint Poetry Winners - Kathryn Bevis and Jim McElroy

Kathryn Bevis is a neurodivergent poet and poetry techare, former Hampshire Poet Laureate, and founder of the Writing School Online. She is the Selected Poet for Magma (the Solitude issue) and her poems have appeared widely in magazines and journals, including: Poetry Review, Poetry Wales, Poetry Ireland Review, The London Magazine, Mslexia, Wasafiri, and Bad Lilies. She designs and delivers poetry courses for adults in mental health settings, substance-misuse recovery settings, and prisons and is working towards her first collection.

Jim McElroy was first published in 2018. In 2019 he was selected for Poetry Ireland Introductions, won second prize in the Bridport Poetry Prize, and was awarded an Individual Artist Award by Arts Council NI. He is the winner of the 2020 Francis Ledwidge Poetry Award, the 2021 Seamus Heaney Award for New Writing, the 2021 Poetry Business International Book and Pamphlet Competition, and joint winner of the 2022 Mairtín Crawford Poetry Award. He has been shortlisted for the Rialto Pamphlet Award, Gutter Edwin Morgan Prize, Bridport Poetry Prize, Cúirt New Writing Prize, Gregory O'Donoghue International Poetry Competition, runner-up in the Fingal Poetry Prize and nominated for Pushcart and Forward prizes. His winning pamphlet, We Are The Weather, is published by SmithlDoorstop.

Click here to read his winning collection of poems.

If you want to know more about Jim, click here to read an exclusive interview with the poet  

Thanks to the judges and supporters of the Mairtín Crawford Awards 2023