Archives: JudgesTTTT

Matthew Sperling’s debut novel, Astroturf, was published by riverrun in 2018 and longlisted for the Wellcome Book Prize, and his second novel will be published in summer 2020. His short fiction, critical writing, and poetry have appeared in publications including Apollo, Best British Short Stories 2015, the Guardian, the Junket, the New Statesman, 1843, and 3:AM. He is Lecturer in English Literature from 1900 to the Present at University College London, and previously worked at the Universities of Oxford and Reading. His academic publications include Visionary Philology: Geoffrey Hill and the Study of Words, published by Oxford University Press in 2014.

Sarah Shaffi is a freelance literary journalist and editor. She writes regularly for Stylist Magazine online and is books editor at Phoenix Magazine. She was a judge for the Jhalak Prize 2019. Sarah is editor-at-large at independent children’s publisher Little Tiger Group. She regularly chairs author events, and is co-founder of BAME in Publishing, a networking group for people of colour in publishing. She can be found tweeting @sarahshaffi and online at www.sarahshaffi.com.

Jude Kelly was the Artistic Director of Southbank Centre in London for 12 years from 2006- 2018, where she established the WOW Festival. Southbank Centre is Europe’s largest Arts Institution and London’s 3rd biggest tourist attraction. In February 2013 she was assessed as one of the 100 most powerful women in the United Kingdom by Woman’s Hour on BBC Radio 4.

She has directed over 100 theatre and opera productions, is the recipient of two Olivier awards for theatre, a BASCA Gold Badge Award winner for contribution to music, a Southbank Award for her opera work, an RPO award for her festival The Rest is Noise, Red Magazine’s 2014 Creative Woman of the Year, CBIs 2016 First Woman Award winner for Tourism and Leisure and in 2017 won the inaugural Veuve Clicquot Woman of the Year Social Purpose Award. Kelly’s talk at a 2016 TED conference, Why women should tell the stories of humanity, has been viewed more than 1.2million times to date.

She was a judge for the Stirling Prize 2018 and is currently undertaking a research project on the gender bias and ethical standards of city developments as part of her role as Practitioner in Residence at The LSEs Marshall Institute.

She is a board member of the Cultural Industries Federation, the Patron of the Mary Wollstonecraft programme, and Artistic Director of the Robert F Kennedy Festival of Human Rights. She has also Chaired the Women’s Prize for fiction and is currently the chair for The Orwell Prize for Political Fiction.

Tom Gatti is deputy editor of the New Statesman. He joined the NS in 2013 as culture editor; before that he was Saturday Review editor at The Times, where he also wrote book reviews, features and interviews. He has judged several literary awards including the Goldsmiths Prize for fiction and the PEN Pinter Prize.

Dr. Christine “Xine” Yao is Lecturer in American Literature to 1900 at University College London. Previously she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of British Columbia after earning her PhD from Cornell University. She is completing a manuscript on the racial and sexual politics of unfeeling as dissent in nineteenth-century American literature and culture. Her scholarly essays have appeared in J19, Occasion, American Quarterly, and American Gothic Culture: An Edinburgh Companion. Xine is the co-host of PhDivas, a podcast about academia, culture, and social justice across the STEM/humanities divide. Her honours include the Yasuo Sakakibara Essay Prize from the American Studies Association and her work has been supported by multiple grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Preti Taneja is the author of We That are Young, (Galley Beggar Press, 2017), a Book of the Year in the Guardian, Sunday Times and the Spectator (UK), The Hindu (India) and a 2018 Library Journal top 10 literary fiction book of the year (USA). We That Are Young has listed for international awards including the Prix Jan Michalski, the Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize and the Republic of Consciousness Prize, and is the winner of the 2018 Desmond Elliott Prize for the UK’s best debut of the year. It is being translated into several languages and is published in the USA and Canada by A.A Knopf. Preti began her career training disadvantaged young people across the UK in media skills; she has over a decade of experience as a human rights researcher, writer and editor working in conflict and post conflict zones, and of teaching writing including in prison. She holds a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellowship at Warwick University.

Sam Leith is the Literary Editor of The Spectator, a columnist for the FT and regular book reviewer for the Guardian, FT, Telegraph and TLS. He’s the author of several books, most recently Write To The Point: How To Be Clear, Correct and Persuasive on the Page.

Tom Sutcliffe is the presenter of Radio Four’s arts review programme Saturday Review and Round Britain Quiz. After graduating from Cambridge he joined the BBC as a producer in Talks and Documentaries, and was eventually appointed editor of Kaleidoscope, Radio Four’s long running arts magazine programme. He left in 1986 to help launch the Independent, where he was Arts Editor, Associate Editor and a regular writer on the Arts and Comment pages. In 2000 his book, Watching: Reflections on the Movies, was published by Faber and Faber.