The Judging Team for 2019

Laura Williams joined Greene and Heaton as an agent in 2018. She worked at Peters Fraser and Dunlop from 2011, after completing a degree in Classics at Oxford. She is actively building a fiction list and a small non-fiction list. She is currently looking for literary fiction, edgy commercial fiction, psychological thrillers and high-concept contemporary young adult, as well as narrative non-fiction of all types.

 

Vaseem Khan is the author of the bestselling Baby Ganesh Detective Agency series featuring Indian detective Ashwin Chopra and his baby elephant sidekick. The first book in the series, The Unexpected Inheritance of Inspector Chopra, was a Times bestseller, and a Waterstones Paperback of the Year. Vaseem is a strong proponent of literacy and the need for inclusivity in publishing. He has previously judged Spread the Word's London Writers Awards aimed at discovering exciting new voices from the capital. He is particularly keen on well written prose, and intrigued by fiction that is unafraid of exploring edgy, quirky or taboo subjects, the road less travelled, or by writers who revisit familiar themes in exciting new ways.

Philip Gross has published some twenty collections of poetry, including A Bright Acoustic (Bloodaxe, 2017). The Water Table won the T.S.Eliot Prize 2009, and Love Songs of Carbon the Roland Mathias Award (Wales Book of The Year) 2016. He is a keen collaborator across artforms, eg with artist Valerie Coffin Price on A Fold In The River (Seren, 2015). 2018 saw two new collaborations – with Australian poet-artist Jenny Pollak on Shadowplay (Flarestack) and with poet Lesley Saunders on A Part of the Main (Mulfran), an exploration of ideas of insularity and migration in our fractious times – as well as a science-based collection for young people, Dark Sky Park, from Otter-Barry Books.

Chris Redmond is a poet, musician and artistic director of Tongue Fu. Let the Pig Out is the first collection from Chris and, read or performed, it entertains as only the written word can. Chris is the creator and host of Tongue Fu - one of the UK's leading spoken word and music shows, where poets, comedians and storytellers perform with improvised music and films.

As an educator, Chris leads workshops in writing, performing and musicianship. Clients include the British Council (Spain, South Africa, Brazil), BBC, BAC, National Theatre, The Roundhouse, Forward Foundation and St Mary's University, Twickenham. He is the perfect judge for the Writing Without Restriction category.