First Place: Cockroach by Claire Nelson  

Claire has worked as an actress and is now a performing arts teacher at a further education college. She  recently wrote and performed Motherhood, a one-woman show about knife crime for Oxford’s Offbeat Festival. This was based on a monologue she created for the last Mama Quilla Mentoring Women Writers show. She now hopes to tour this to theatres and community venues alongside a creative writing project for families who have lived experience of knife crime.

Cockroach was inspired by the idea that after a nuclear bomb, cockroaches were the only life-form likely to survive and I began thinking about the kind of scavenging mentality that might go with a human cockroach—how they'd exploit others and look to any advantage they could in order to survive. We'd like to think about how the suffering of war can bring out the best in people but sometimes it probably brings out the worst too and I wanted to confront this. Claire Nelson

First Runner-Up: Tomorrow by Ann Morgan

Ann Morgan began her writing journey with poetry many years ago, later expanding into acting, stand-up comedy, and ultimately, playwriting and monologues. She has written two full-length plays: Brian!, a comedy, and The Past Present, a drama inspired by events from 60 years ago. She is also the author of a one-act, one-hour play titled No!, set in America and focused on reproductive rights.

 In addition, several of her shorter works have been performed at various venues, including the Alhambra Studio (Bradford), Grand Opera House (York, as part of the York International Shakespeare Festival), Furnace at Leeds Playhouse, 14/48 Festival (Leicester), Freedom Studios (Bradford), Bingley Little Theatre, Bowling Lodge (Bradford), Queer Words Festival (Liverpool), Leeds Pub Theatre, Otley Pub Theatre, and Talking Horse Productions (Missouri, USA).  

She also wrote a festival-length piece that was performed at Bradford Cathedral, following its selection for the Climate Change Symposium held there.

I first read about the “Comfort Women” some years ago and was deeply touched. The horrific abuse of the women both during the war by their own “side”, and the shame and pain that they have endured over the years, since. Not forgetting their fight to have their trauma recognised. Their suffering has stayed with me, and when I saw the Women and War theme, I knew I had to write about it. No woman should ever have to go through what they did. No woman should have to fight for the word “sorry.” Ann Morgan

Second Runner-Up: Tanya by Margarita Gokun Silver

Margarita Gokun Silver is a writer, playwright, and freelance journalist. Her work has been published in The New York Times, The Guardian, The Atlantic, and other outlets. She is the author of the award-winning essay collection I Named My Dog Pushkin (Thread, 2021), and she recently directed a one-act play she wrote, Nightmare in Red Square, at La Escalera de Jacob, a theater in Madrid, Spain.

“Tanya is one of the scenes in a larger, mosaic-format play that focuses on the effects of war on women. Although its goal is to explore a universal theme, Tanya (and the full play) are both based on reporting that came out of Ukraine and one of the scenes is the story of my cousin.” Margarita Gokun Silver