THE BEVERLY PRIZE SHORTLIST 2016!

The Beverly Prize announces its winner for 2016 next week!

This prize (named after an Irish-Canadian writer and book-lover) may be unique in the publishing world (you tell me) in that it is likely the most inclusive and open:

Any nationality can enter; any age 18 or older; and you can enter (so long as it is mostly unpublished and original) ANY FORM OR GENRE of writing for consideration - from non-fiction to a novella, a short story collection, a novel, a play, a screenplay, a memoir, a biography, or a pamphlet or full collection of poetry. The only caveat, is it must be written in English.

This year, we received a good number of entries - and after a good deal of hemming and hawing, re-reading and debating, the three editorial team judges (Oliver Jones, Rosanna Hildyard, and Todd Swift) were able to cleave to a decision not to have a shortlist verging on the rather long, but still keep a wonderful range of voices, emphatically new and old, more and less established.

So, we have 14, a baker's dozen plus one for good luck - and, overall, it is a pleasingly fascinating, international list for our final judge to read through over the hols.  Ms K. Davio will announce the winner in early 2017, and they will be published within 12 months.  Not bad, eh? Here they are in no order particularly, to emphasize the eclectic nature of the prize - do spread the word on social media. They're all talented.

Urvashi Bahuguna's poems have been published or are forthcoming in Barely South Review, Jaggery Lit, Kitaab, Cadaverine, The Four Quarters Magazine and elsewhere. She is a journalist and poet from India, who has studied on the MA in Creative Writing at the UEA.

J. A. Bernstein’s novel, Rachel's Tomb, won the 2016 Hackney Literary Prize and 2015 Knut House Novel Contest. His essay collection, In Josephat's Valley, was runner-up for the 2015 Red Hen Press Nonfiction Book Award. His stories and essays have appeared in Boston Review, Kenyon Review Online, Shenandoah, World Literature Today, Tampa Review, and other journals, and garnered the Gunyon Prize from Crab Orchard Review. He has also published academic articles on Joseph Conrad. A Chicago-native, he is an assistant professor of English at the University of Minnesota Duluth and the fiction editor of Tikkun.

Andrew D. Miller was born in Fresno, California. He did his Masters of Fine Arts at Virginia Commonwealth University, and then went on to complete an academic PhD in the Institute of English, German and Romantic Studies at Copenhagen University in 2010. His poetry has appeared in many magazines, such as River Review, Prairie Schooner, New Orleans Review, Nimrod, and Hunger Mountain. Miller is the author of Poetry, Photograph, Ekphrasis, Lyrical Representations of Photography from the 19^th Century to the Present and the co-editor of The Gazer Within, the Selected Prose of Larry Levis, a volume of Michigan Press’ Poets on Poetry Series. He lives in Copenhagen, Denmark.

Ian Harrow was born in 1945. He was educated at a grammar school in Newcastle upon Tyne and at Leeds University. From 1983-1990 he was Head of the School of Art at Lancashire Polytechnic (now University of Central Lancashire). He has published four collections, the most recent being Words Take Me (Lapwing, 2013). He is of Scots-Irish extraction and lives in York. His work has appeared since 1975 in many publications, including the Times Literary Supplement, Stand, Poetry Wales, Poetry Ireland Review, London Magazine, Rialto, Oxford Magazine, and The Spectator. Bernard O'Donoghue called Words Take Me 'an utterly absorbing book that stays hauntingly in the memory. It is a major achievement.'

Sohini Basak has poems and short stories in the 3:AM Magazine, Aainanagar, Missing Slate, Ambit, Lighthouse, as well as in anthologies of Emma Press and Poetrywala. She won second prize at the 2013 RædLeaf India Poetry Prize; was shortlisted for the Melita Hume and the Jane Martin poetry prizes in 2014; and was a 2015-16 fellow of the (Great) Indian Poetry Collective. She studied literature and creative writing at the universities of Delhi, Warwick, and East Anglia, where she received the Malcolm Bradbury continuation grant for poetry. She is a social media manager for Asymptote journal and lives and works in Delhi.

Charles Wilkinson’s publications include The Pain Tree and Other Stories (London Magazine Editions, 2000), Ag & Au (Flarestack Poets, 2013) and A Twist in the Eye (Egaeus Press, 2016). His poems have appeared in many magazines, including Tears in the Fence, Poetry Wales,The Raintown Review and Poetry Salzburg. He has had short stories in Best English Short Stories 2 (W.W. Norton, USA),  Best British Short Stories 2015 (Salt) and Best Weird Fiction 2015 (Undertow Books, Canada).  He lives in Powys, Wales.

Les Bohem was a small part of the great Los Angeles music scare of the 1980s, with his own band, Gleaming Spires, and as a member of the band, Sparks.  Somehow that evolved into a career writing for the movies and television.  Les wrote Twenty Bucks, Daylight, Dante’s Peak, The Alamo and the mini-series, Taken, for which he won an Emmy award.  He’s had songs recorded by Emmylou Harris, Randy Travis, Freddy Fender, Steve Gillette, Johnette Napolitano (of Concrete Blonde), and Alvin (of the Chipmunks.)  His first novel, Flight 505, was published last year by UpperRubberBoot.  He created the series, Shut Eye, now streaming on Hulu.  His new album, Moved to Duarte, has just been released on Jack Rabbit Day Records.

Rich Murphy has taught writing and literature at colleges and universities for thirty years. Murphy’s book-length collection Body Politic will be published by Prolific Press early in 2017. His credits also include three books: Americana, Prize Americana 2013 winner; Voyeur 2008 Gival Press Poetry Award; and The Apple in the Monkey Tree, Codhill Press; chapbooks, Great Grandfather, Family Secret, Hunting and Pecking, Rescue Lines,  Phoems for Mobile Vices, and Paideia. He also publishes essays on poetics in journals. Derek Walcott has remarked, “Mr. Murphy is a very careful craftsman in his work, a patient and testing intelligence . . . .”

Winner of Able Muse and Fiction International ’s 2015 Fiction Prizes, Andrea Witzke Slot is author of the poetry collection To find a new beauty (Gold Wake Press) and a recently-finished novel manuscript titled The Cartography of Flesh: in the silence of Ella Mendelssohn. Publications include Mid-American Review, Ambit, Southeast Review, Under the Radar, Meridian, American Literary Review, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and books by SUNY Press and Palgrave Macmillan, which include her essays on poetry and social change. An American expat and permanent resident of the UK, Andrea lives in London but visits Chicago regularly.

Joseph Harrington is the author of Things Come On (an amneoir) (Wesleyan UP, 2011) and the critical work Poetry and the Public (Wesleyan UP, 2002). His creative work has appeared or is forthcoming in BAX: The Best American Experimental Writing 2016, Bombay Gin, Hotel Amerika, Colorado Review, The Rumpus, 1913: a journal of forms, and Fact-Simile, among others. Harrington is the recipient of a Millay Colony residency and a Fulbright Distinguished Chair. He teaches at the University of Kansas in Lawrence.

Chris Preddle’s second collection is Cattle Console Him (Waywiser, 2010).  His work has appeared in Irish Pages, Little Star, PN Review, The Poetry Review, Scintilla, The Shop, Stand, The Yellow Nib and other magazines.  In 2012 he came second in the Strokestown competition and was shortlisted for the Manchester Poetry Prize.  He has won first prizes in the Scintilla and Poetry on the Lake competitions.  He is working on translations of Sappho’s songs.  He lived until recently in Holme on a shoulder of the Yorkshire Pennines.

C.P. Mangel was counsel for a pharmaceutical company for over twenty years, and then received an MFA in creative writing from the University of British Columbia. Mangel lives and works in North Carolina.

Robert D. Kirvel is a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net 2016 nominee for fiction, 2016 winner of the Fulton Prize for the Short Story, and a 2015 ArtPrize winner for creative nonfiction. He has published stories or essays in the UK, New Zealand, and Germany; in translation and anthologies; and in a score of U.S. literary journals, such as Columbia College Literary Review and Arts & Letters.

Stuart Ross is a writer whose work has appeared in The Awl, DIAGRAM, Eclectica Magazine, Funhouse Magazine, HTML Giant, Pioneertown, The Stockholm Review of Literature, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, and other places. He is co-author of the novella Markson’s Pier, published by Essays & Fictions. He was awarded first place, non-fiction in the Summer Literary Seminars 2013 contest. He has been a resident of the Ragdale Foundation and is a Pushcart Prize nominee. Stuart is a graduate of Queens College, City University of New York and the Creative Writing program at the University of Notre Dame.