Judges’ Comment From 

Shortlisted – Fragments from a Paper Witch by Marion May Campbell (Salt Publishing)

Fragments from a Paper Witch gathers a rich collection of Marion Campbell’s writing: essays, poems, stories and a short play. Campbell is seriously playful with language, big on puns, intense with intent. Her collection belongs in a literary tradition sometimes modernist, sometimes post-modernist, but always feminist. Campbell is not afraid to take intellectual risks and her collection records a deep fascination with the politics of language and its use. Perhaps the most successful of these “fragments” paradoxically catch out “language at play” at the same time as they worry at the complexity and contradictions of “lived experience”.