The winner of the 2015 Bridge Award was Vicky MacKenzie, a poet and fiction writer from Fife.
Vicky received a year’s package to support the writing of her novel, Brantwood, based on the life of Victorian art critic John Ruskin.
Judge Cynthia Rogerson said:
‘The entries for this Bridge Awards were some of the best work I’ve ever judged in a competition. Most of them felt like the work of well-established writers, not unpublished new writers. It was an incredibly difficult task, choosing a winner. This bodes well for Scotland’s literary health.
‘Unanimously, we felt that Vicky’s piece was outstanding. We felt she had done a huge amount of research to bring the character to life, and that her work was professional and of a very high literary standard.’
Vicky MacKenzie is a poet and fiction writer who lives in the East Neuk of Fife. She has a PhD in Contemporary Poetry from the University of St Andrews and works as a tutor for the Open College of the Arts. Her work has been published in magazines and anthologies including Magma, Brittle Star and Gutter, and has been awarded prizes such as the Ruth Rendell Short Story Competition and the McLellan Poetry Prize.