Freya Bantiff wins the Bridport Prize Young Writers Award

A huge congratulations to Freya Bantiff, joint winner of the Bridport Prize Young Writers Award 2022, along with co-winner Nicole Adabunu.

The Bridport Prize is made up of several categories across fiction and poetry. The Young Writers Award offers £500 to the highest-placed writer/s aged 16 to 25 in Poetry, Short Story, Flash Fiction and Novel. The winning piece/s will feature in the Bridport anthology, which opens doors with literary agents and publishers. It also accesses other competitions not available to the public.

Judge Inua Ellams said of Freya’s winning poem ‘Working Debenhams’ Late Shift’ “A gorgeous poem that begins as a critique of hyper–capitalist retail tradition, then grows to a tender portrait of a young woman’s relationship with her father.”

Freya Bantiff is a poet and fiction writer from Sheffield. A member of Hive Poetry, she has placed in a wide range of competitions including joint-first prize in the 2022 Bridport Poetry Prize (18-25s), and winning the Canterbury Poet of the Year Competition 2021, the Bedford Poetry Competition 2021, the Walter Swan Poetry Prize 2020 (18-25s) and the Timothy Corsellis Poetry Prize in 2017. Freya’s poems and stories have been placed in Dear Life anthology (Hive 2022), the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award (2021), Mslexia Flash Fiction Competition (2020), the Ilkley Literature Poetry Festival (2010–2015) and Foyle Young Poet of the Year (2015).