His fellow judge Glenn Patterson has much the same experience. "When I was finishing school in Belfast, a teacher suggested that I send some poems to Frank Ormsby, editor of The Honest Ulsterman.

Frank kindly but firmly told me that I wasn't a poet and may never be a poet, but was encouraging about carrying on writing. I always advise anyone who is sending work out for the first time that if you get a rejection and if there's a word of encouragement at all, believe it.

If they say they would like to see more of your work, they genuinely want to see more."

Patterson ended up doing a Creative Writing course at East Anglia University, where Angela Carter promised that if the rest of a first novel he was writing was up to the standard of what she'd read, then she'd recommend it to the publishers Chatto & Windus. And she did.

His debut novel, Burning your Own, which viewed the North's sectarian violence through the eyes of a 10-year-old boy on a Protestant housing estate, was published in 1988 when he was 26 and went on to win the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature.

Archie Markham, who was born on Montserrat, but grew up in Europe, started writing poems and stories by accident. "I was in fringe theatre in London in the late 1960s and before that I dabbled in theatre at university, writing plays and things. Then I went to the Caribbean with a theatre company and ran into all sorts of problems with my plays.

Because of the difficulty of getting them staged, I decided there were bits I liked and bits other people seemed to like and I extracted them and started reading them in public, and these really were my first poems. I thought, well okay, if people are beginning to call me a poet and beginning to publish the stuff, I really must seriously learn about poetry. In the same way, the short stories were sections of the plays I couldn't do anything with that I sort of fictionalised. So both the poems and stories came out of failure. Then when I started to publish collections of stories, people in England said but you know these collections of short stories are just one stage from a novel, why don't you make it a novel. So with me, everything came out of something else. It's possible I'm not any of these things. I'm not a poet, I'm not a story writer, I'm not a novelist, I'm still someone trying to find some sort of shape."

Like Patterson, he has found nothing succeeds like failure. "I remember getting rejection slips from Alan Ross in London Magazine. Each was handwritten and used what I later discovered was his stock phrase . . . 'it's nearly there'. I believed it was nearly there and I persisted. A decade later Alan was publishing my poems and stories."