Melanie Banim

Melanie Banim is a writer, poet and educator from Liverpool, who focuses on stitching silenced women and children’s (hi)stories into her work, the Irish diaspora, and exploring how families have the ability to do – and undo – harm.

In 2022, Banim was shortlisted for the Bridport Poetry Prize and, in 2023, highly commended in the Manchester Poetry Prize. She is published in Sentinel Literary Journal (winning both first prize and highly commended) and New Voices Rise. In 2023, Banim was long-listed for the Rialto Nature and Place Poetry Prize, Plaza and Cúirt prizes, and was shortlisted for the Bath Flash Fiction Prize. In June 2023, Banim was also shortlisted for Northern Writers’ Awards Debut Poet of the Year.

Since 2022, Banim has been an Emerging Writer at The London Library, and is the only writer selected from 900 applicants who is based in the North of England. Banim also writes on the six month Stinging Fly fiction programme at Irish Writers’ Centre, Dublin, and was chosen for their poetry Summer School. Banim was selected to write and perform a poem for City of Light, an immersive exhibition on a lake as part of Writing on the Wall Festival 2019, which attracted over a thousand visitors.

Beyond writing, Banim leads a programme for emerging artists and music professionals at Sound City and in her work in higher education, she leads arts-focused strategy and student support. Banim has developed short films for television with disadvantaged young people, and delivered reading projects with marginalised communities. She is working on both a poetry and short story collection, between Liverpool, Dublin and London. Her Bildungsroman poems explore themes of class, how people interact with place, and the unsayable.