JUDGES

LENNIE GOODINGS is Publisher of Virago and is the editor of, among others, Sarah Waters, Sarah Dunant, Gillian Slovo, Linda Grant, Natasha Walters, Kate Figes, Margaret Atwood, Josephine Hart, Maya Angelou, Frances Osborne, Joan Bakewell, Shirley Williams, Lisa Appignanesi, Katharine Whitehorn and Poppy Adams. Virago believes that books by women of talent are of interest to everyone and that other people's stories can change the way one views the world.

SARAH WATERS is one of Britain's greatest storytellers. Three of her novels, Tipping the Velvet, Affinity, and Fingersmith, have been televised. She won a Betty Trask Award, the Somerset Maugham Award and, for Fingersmith, the Ellis Peters Dagger Award for Historical Crime Fiction and the South Bank Show Award for Literature. Fingersmith and The Night Watch were shortlisted for the Man Booker and Orange prizes and The Little Stranger was shortlisted for the Man Booker.

POLLY SAMSON was born in London in 1962 and is the author of two collections of short stories: Lying in Bed and Perfect Lives, and a novel,Out of the Picture, all published by Virago.  She has written stories for BBC Radio 4 and various anthologies and has worked in publishing, journalism and as a lyricist. As well as judging this year's AshamAward, she will also be contributing a short story to the anthology.

GUEST WRITERS

NAOMI ALDERMAN’s short story, Gravity, won third prize in the 2004 Asham Award. Her first novel, Disobedience, serialised on BBC Radio 4, won the Orange Award for New Writers. In 2007 she was named Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year and short-listed for the 2009 BBC National Short Story Award. The Lessons, published in 2010, was serialised on Radio 4. Naomi also writes computer games and a weekly games column for The Guardian.

PETINA GAPPAH is a Zimbabwean writer with law degrees from Cambridge, Gras and Zimbabwe universities. She lives with her son Kush in Geneva, where she works as counsel in an international organisation providing legal aid on international trade law to developing countries. She is currently completing The Book of Memory, her first novel. Her collection of short stories An Elegy for Easterly won the 2009 Guardian First Book Award.

KATE CLANCHY has published three collections of poetry, Slattern, Samarkand and Newborn, and won numerous awards, including Saltire and the Somerset Maugham prizes. In 2008 she published a memoir, Antigona and Me, which won the Writers' Guild Award. In 2009 she won the V. S. Pritchett Prize and the BBC National Short Story Award and is currently working on a book of short stories.