Gloucestershire Writers’ Network 2025 Competition

Prose Judge - Jamila Gavin

Jamila Gavin, was born in India of Anglo-Indian heritage and has been publishing childrens’ books for all ages since 1979. Her inspiration was to reflect the changing face of multicultural Britain, always wanting every child to be able to acknowledge their heritage, and to find their mirror image in books.

Among her many publications are The Magic Orange Tree, Grandpa Chatterji, and Blackberry Blue, for younger readers; and novels such as The Surya Trilogy, (Guardian Children’s Fiction Award)  Coram Boy, (winner of Children’s Whitbread Prize 2000) and The Blood Stone for YA.  Her latest novel, “Never Forget You,” was published in July 2022. (Winner of the Two Cities Award) Her next novel, “My Soul a Shining Tree” will be published in 2025.   

She has also written for radio, television, and stage. Recently, she has collaborated with the composer, Russell Hepplewhite, by writing texts and poems for him to set to music, including a musical cantata, Elements, commissioned by Tessa Armstrong’s children’s charity, “Voices for Life.”  This was followed by a further collaboration on a musical nativity play called The Monmouth Nativity, commissioned by Monmouth Prep School – as Jamila commented - a wonderful turn of the wheel back to her first love, music.

In 2015, Jamila was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and this year  she was awarded an MBE in the King’s Birthday Honours List for Services to Children’s Literature.

What I'm Looking For

As a judge, I’m obviously looking for originality whether in prose or poetry. But more than that. Mystery.

Writing comes from the individual, and so I want to see something revealing about the writer: how they perceive the world, what it means to them to be alive now – or may be – with imagination, what it would be like to be alive in the past or the future. Observation — not just introspection — but about people; the world; your aspirations.

Some writers find it easier to express themselves by looking into another time. But others look at their own contemporary world. Where you live. I want to get a glimpse of their opinions: sharp, critical, loving, hating: personal. You can be angry in poetry: look at Shelley – on the one hand lyrically beautiful, on the other hand, political and furious:
“I met Murder on the way—
He had a mask like Castlereagh—
Very smooth he looked, yet grim;
Seven blood-hounds followed him:

Go on! be brave.

Poetry Judge - Kate Potts

Kate Potts is a poet, creative writing lecturer, mentor and editor.

Her new book Pretenders, a multi-vocal work exploring imposter feelings and 'imposter syndrome', will be published by Bloodaxe Books in March 2025.

Her previous collection Feral (Bloodaxe 2018) was a Poetry Book Society recommendation and a Telegraph Poetry Book of the Month. Her poetry has been shortlisted for The Moth International Poetry Prize and commended in the Forward Prizes. Kate teaches for Dialect Writers and The Poetry School.

She taught creative writing for Middlesex University, Royal Holloway and Oxford University before moving to Gloucestershire in 2021. She lives in Stroud with her son.

My favourite piece of poetry advice is Robert Frost’s “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.” I like to read poems in which there’s something risked, something at stake, and through which reader and writer can share an exploration, revelation, or illumination.

The quality I admire in all my favourite writing is the kind of generosity and bravery that enables this kind of risk. This mighty mean a willingness to risk being exposed as vulnerable, foolish, unfashionable, or wrong. I also enjoy poetry that experiments and takes playful risks in its use of language, form, and technique, if this is integral to the poem as a whole. When you look closely at it, the most successful poetry always demonstrates a happy marriage of form and function. By this I mean that the poem’s form—its shape on the page, its lineation, syntax, rhythm, sound and cadence—works to help the poem in what it’s trying to communicate, express, or do. Decisions in the poem’s composition and revision have been made to help the poem find its best way of existing.

I once studied with a brilliant voice coach whose advice on poetry readings was not to get in the way of the poem. This applies to my writing too, I now realise, and I really enjoy poetry that doesn’t obfuscate, avoid or fudge the issue, or wrap things up in cryptic allusions—unless obfuscation and avoidance is an intentional part of what the poem is doing. This doesn’t mean the poem has to be plain and direct. It’s just that I prefer poetry that isn’t afraid to do what it needs to do. Having said all of this, I know that our creative, poetry writing minds are as individual and idiosyncratic as we are.

When I read the competition entries, I’m hoping to be surprised, entertained, moved and enlightened. I’m hoping to read the kind of poetry you love to write.