With thanks, the judges of the 2024 Paul Torday Memorial Prize:

Anni Domingo

Anni Domingo, Actress, Director, and Writer, works extensively in Radio, TV, Films and Theatre. She trained at Rose Bruford College of Speech and Drama, later obtaining two more BA degrees and an MA at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge. She has worked in America, Europe, Africa, Australia and in many theatres around UK including The National Theatre and has just finished performing in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park on tour and at Watermill Theatre. Anni works regularly as a Theatre Director. She currently lectures on Drama and directs at St. Mary’s University in Twickenham, Rose Bruford College of Speech and Drama, Royal Central College and at Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts. Her poems and short stories are published in various anthologies. ‘Empty Cradle’ is published in the anthology Secret and Silent Tears and three of her poems are in another anthology Wild Imperfections, published by Penguin in November 2021. Anni’s novel Breaking the Maafa Chain was short-listed for the Lucy Cavendish First novel Competition and longlisted for Mslexia novel competition 2019. She won a place at Hedgebrook Writers in Residence Programme in Seattle and the National Writing Centre’s Escalator programme in Norwich. An extract from her novel Breaking the Maafa Chain also won the Myriad Editions First Novel competition in 2018 and is featured in the New Daughters of Africa (2019) anthology edited by Margaret Busby. Her first screenplay, ‘Blessed Assurance’ has just been filmed and will be out later this year. Her debut novel, Breaking the Maafa Chain, was published in September 2021, by Jacaranda Books, UK and by Pegasus Books, USA in 2022. Anni is now working on her second novel Ominira as part of her PhD at Kings College London.

Gaby Koppel

After a career as a print journalist and television producer, Gaby’s debut novel Reparation won the Christopher Little Literary Agency Prize, was long-listed for the Bath Novel Award and runner-up for the Paul Torday Prize. It has been on the modern Jewish literature syllabus at the cultural centre JW3 and the London School for Jewish Studies. Born in Cardiff to refugees from Eastern Europe, Gaby lives in Stamford Hill, North London, where she continues to work in television and journalism, and is writing a second novel inspired as before by her family history.

Trevor Wood

Trevor Wood’s first novel, The Man on the Street, won the Crime Writers’ Association’s John Creasey New Blood Dagger for best debut and the Crimefest Specsavers Debut Novel of the Year. It was also shortlisted for the Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year and has been optioned for television by World Productions, the makers of Line of Duty. It was followed by the highly-acclaimed sequel, One Way Street and the final book in the trilogy, Dead End Street was released in 2022. His fourth book, You Can Run, a standalone thriller set in a remote Northumberland village was recently published in paperback. Trevor teaches the Faber Academy’s Crime Writing Course, is one of the founder members of the Northern Crime Syndicate and is a volunteer chef at the People’s Kitchen in Newcastle, a charity that provides hot meals for around 200 hundred people every day. Read more about Trevor using the following links: Website Facebook.