We are delighted to have three judges for our competition this year: Janet Sutherland, Alex Josephy and Chris Goode.
Janet, Alex and Chris will work together to short list and select our winners, commended and highly commended poems.
Janet Sutherland is the author of five poetry collections, most recently The Messenger House (Shearsman Books, 2023). Her previous collections all from Shearsman are Home Farm (2019), Bone Monkey (2014), Hangman’s Acre (2009) and Burning the Heartwood (2006). The Messenger House, a hybrid collection, is about her great-great-grandfather’s travels to Serbia in the 1840’s. Widely anthologised, she is published in magazines such as New Statesman, The Spectator and The North. She won the 2017 Kent and Sussex Poetry Prize and received a Hawthornden Fellowship for 2018. https://www.janetsutherland.co.uk/
Alex lives and writes in East Sussex and Italy. She has worked as a teacher and university lecturer and as an NHS education adviser. Her published collections include Again Behold the Stars, a Cinnamon Press pamphlet award winner, 2023, and Naked Since Faversham, Pindrop Press, 2020. Her poems have won the McLellan and Battered Moons prizes, and have appeared widely in magazines and anthologies. Her third full collection, ‘A Little Bridge, will be published by Pindrop Press in 2026.
You can find out more on her website: www.alexjosephy.net
Chris has been writing poetry since age 16. He is a co-founder of Seahaven Poets and an organiser of regular Open Mic evenings at the Wellington Hotel in Seaford. He also hosts a bi-weekly poetry group at the Wellington. His poems have been featured at various locations around Sussex.
