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Meet the Shortlist for 2024

Will Boast

Photo credit: Billy Hayes

Will Boast is the author of a story collection, Power Ballads (Iowa Short Fiction Award, 2011), a memoir, Epilogue (Liveright/Norton and Granta Books, 2015), and a novel, Daphne (Liveright/Norton and Granta Books, 2018). His short fiction, reporting, and essays have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, The Guardian, The American Scholar, and the Virginia Quarterly Review, among other publications. He's held fellowships from Stanford University, the University of Virginia, the American Academy in Rome, and the University of East Anglia, and he's taught at the University of Chicago, the Joel Nafuma Refugee Center in Rome, and Royal Holloway, University of London. Will was born in Southampton, and now lives in London.

Lucy Caldwell

Photo credit: Debbie Taussig

Lucy Caldwell is the author of four novels, three collections of short stories, and several stage plays and radio dramas. Her latest novel, These Days, won the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction and her latest collection of short stories, Openings, was published by Faber in May of this year. She was awarded the Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ National Short Story Prize in 2021 for “All the People Were Mean and Bad”. In 2022 she was awarded the EM Forster Prize from the American Academy of Arts & Letters for her body of work to date. Lucy is a patron of the Belfast Book Festival, of Fighting Words NI, and is a Founding Patron of the Niamh Louise Foundation, which seeks to raise awareness of, and to prevent, teen suicide in the North of Ireland. Lucy was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland but now lives in Folkestone, Kent.

Manish Chauhan

Photo credit: Manish Chauhan

Manish Chauhan works as a finance lawyer and is a graduate of Creative Writing from the University of Oxford, and courses run by Curtis Brown Creative and The Stinging Fly. His work has been longlisted for the Curtis Brown First Novel Award (November 2019) and shortlisted for the DGA First Novel Prize (July 2020), for the Galley Beggar Short Story Prize (2021/2022), the Exeter Short Story Award (November 2019) and The Evesham Festival of Words Prize (March 2020). His work has also appeared in Prole Magazine and ‘Queer life, Queer love’ an anthology published by Muswell Hill Press. Manish was born in Leicester and now lives in East London.

Ross Raisin

Photo credit: Stephen Garnett

Ross Raisin is the author of four novels: A Hunger (2022), A Natural (2017), Waterline (2011) and God’s Own Country (2008). He won the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year award in 2009, and in 2013 was named on Granta’s once a decade Best of Young British Novelists list. In 2018 he was awarded a Fellowship by the Royal Society of Literature. He has written short stories for various publications, including Granta, Prospect, the Sunday Times, Esquire, Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Radio 3 and 4, and in 2018 published a book for the ‘Read This’ series, on the practice of fiction writing. Since 2010, Ross teaches at the University of Leeds and, as a writer-in-residence, for the education charity First Story. Ross was born in Keighley, Yorkshire and now lives in York.

Vee Walker

Photo credit: Wonder Years Photography

Vee Walker wrote her first story at Inchmore Primary School in the Scottish Highlands, age eight. She has an M.A. in French and Italian (University of Edinburgh, 1984) and a postgraduate M.Soc.Sc in Heritage Management from the Ironbridge Institute and University of Birmingham (1989). Vee has pursued a lifelong career in museums and heritage, working initially for the Imperial War Museum onboard HMS Belfast and then for the National Trust for Scotland (NTS) and the National Trust (NT) in England. She launched her heritage interpretation consultancy Interpretaction in 1999 and spent twenty years honing her writing and editing skills on material for a wide variety of clients, including both NT and NTS, RSPB, Historic Environment Scotland, Scottish Natural Heritage, Forestry Commission Scotland, Woodland Trust Scotland and The Highland Council among many more. Her novel, Major Tom’s War, was shortlisted for the inaugural Society for Army Historical Research (SAHR) Military Fiction Awards 2019 and her short story Cinder Toffee, won the Hugh Miller Writing Competition Fiction Prize in 2020. Her fictional young adult novella The Tale of Eppy Hogg, was shortlisted for The Kelpies Prize 2023. Vee was born in Poole, Dorset but raised on the Black Isle where she still lives. She identifies as Scottish.