What makes a winner? Lessons from judging a writing competition

You might remember an exciting post here in the last days of 2017 – the Triskele Big Five mentoring competition. Triskele is a publishing house owned by five authors (various posts about them here) – and in the months since that announcement they have been hunting for an unpublished manuscript to mentor. Once they’d gathered their entries and whittled them down to a shortlist, it was my job to choose the final winner.

I wrote in my original post that I anticipated a few challenges and lessons from the task – and I wasn’t wrong. Especially when I found the finalists were a widely varied collection of styles, genres and approaches. How to judge them?

Well, reader, I found a way – and it was all rather interesting. Pictured here is the winner, Philippa Scannell. Hop over to the Triskele blog for all the details … including my attempts to determine the winning formula.