Paul Shanks, Chair of HighlandLIT writes:

 

It is a great pleasure to announce the winners of the Highland Lit Writing Competition 2018. In the competition, we encouraged writers to submit work under a chosen theme; ‘Highland Light’. We received a wide range of excellent pieces in both categories of prose and poetry and picking out a shortlist was no easy task given the quality of the contributors. After some lengthy debate over the submissions, with occasional differences of opinion, we compiled a shortlist of six entries for each category. The winning entries were then selected by Helen Sedgwick (author of The Comet Seekers and The Growing Season).

 

The shortlist for poetry was as follows:

 

Lydia Harris, After “Clouds Clearing” by Jules Bradbury; Ruth Healy, Summer Afternoon; Robert Hume, Some tartan army; Robert Hume, Washing Line, Moniack Mhor; Chloe Macdonald, Amber; Lynn Valentine, The Months of Mourning

 

The winners are:

1st place: Robert Hume, Washing Line, Moniack Mhor

2nd place: Lydia Harris, After “Clouds Clearing” by Jules Bradbury

3rd place: Lynn Valentine, The Months of Mourning

 

The shortlist for prose was as follows:

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Graham Bullen, Highland Light; Amanda Gilmour, Lights Above Oldshoremore; Alicia Ince, Moving Pictures; Charlotte Luke, Lux Aeterna, Donald Mackenzie, Below Another Sky; Malcolm Timperley, The Dying of the Light

 

The winners are:

1st place: Donald Mackenzie, Below Another Sky

2nd place: Amanda Gilmour, Lights above Oldshoremore

3rd place: Alicia Ince, Moving Pictures

 

The winners and those on the shortlist will be published in our forthcoming anthology: Highland Lights. We also plan to include a selection of works that were submitted for the competition; although these did not make the shortlist they were highly commended by the judges. We will be in touch with individual contributors regarding the anthology very shortly.

 

Finally, I would like to thank all of those that submitted work for the competition – it was a pleasure to read and discuss such a broad panoply of diverse and unique voices.

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(The picture below shows the judges hard at work.)