2025 Judges
Nick Laird
Nick Laird was born in Dungannon in County Tyrone in 1975. A poet, novelist, screenwriter, critic, and former lawyer, his awards include the Betty Trask Prize, the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, a Forward Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. For many years he taught at universities in the USA including Columbia, Princeton, and NYU, and is now the Seamus Heaney Professor of Poetry at Queen’s University, Belfast.
Anne Michaels
Anne Michaels is a novelist and poet. Her books have been translated into more than fifty languages and have won dozens of international awards, including the Orange Prize, the Guardian Fiction Prize, the Lannan Award for Fiction, and the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for the Americas. Among many other honours, she is a Royal Society of Literature International Writer, a Guggenheim Fellow, has received honorary degrees, and has served as Toronto’s Poet Laureate. Her novel Fugitive Pieces was adapted as a feature film and was chosen as one of the BBC’s 100 Novels that Shaped the World. Her latest novel, Held, is currently shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize.
Tomasz Różycki
Tomasz Różycki was born in 1970 and is a poet, translator, and essayist. He is the author of several volumes of poetry including Hulanki i swawole (2024), and the prose work Zlodzieje zarówek (2023). He garnered critical acclaim for the book-length poem Twelve Stations, and his collection Colonies—both of which, in their original Polish and in translation—earned awards such as Kościelski Prize, the Wisława Szymborska Award, Le Grand Continent Prize, the Samuel Bogumił Prize, the Vaclav Burian Prize, the Joseph Brodsky Award, and the Northern California Book Award. He has been shortlisted for the Nike Prize, the Griffin Poetry Prize, and the Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize, among others. Różycki was a fellow of the DAAD Artist-in-Berlin Program in 2018, and was awarded a Senate of Berlin Fellowship in 2020.