The Professor Derek Alsop Prize for Creative Writing

This annual prize is awarded in memory of Professor Derek Alsop (1960-2019).

Derek was former Head of the English Department, poet and flash-fiction writer, Restoration and eighteenth-century literature specialist, Beckett critic, and impenitent open‑mic night enthusiast.

The prize is a £50 book token, awarded to the winner at the magazine's launch event.

If you win (and even if you don’t), Derek would say that you must read Samuel Beckett’s Complete Dramatic Works, Rochester’s Selected Poems, and Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy.

Previous winners:

• 2024: Sarah Keenan for ‘The Porch’
• 2023: Cody Fenlon for 'Chicken-Shop'
• 2022: Karen Boswell for ‘Train Track Kids’
• 2021: Florence Dunington for ‘He Didn’t Come Home That Day’
• 2020: Freya Child for ‘The Sun Sets in Abson’