Professor Ursula Hurley is a judge on the panel for the erbacce-prize, she is a Cambridge graduate who went on to study in Italy, Lancaster (where her MA in Creative Writing earned her a distinction) and in Manchester where she is now a Professor at Salford University leading the Equality, Diversity and Inclusion team for the School of Arts, Media and Creative Technology... she is a Member of the National Association of Writers in Education.

Ursula set up and ran the Writing Centre at Liverpool Hope University, winning a number of learning and teaching awards, before joining the Creative Writing team at Salford. Since then she has become a prize-winning poet and prose writer, and continues to work in community engagement incorporating creative practice which plays on the boundaries of fiction and non-fiction. This links with her own critical work which explores contemporary understandings of 'truth' and 'fiction'.

Her first collection of poetry was Tree, published in 2009 which is still in print. She has poems in the anthology From Hepworth's Garden Out, published by Shearsman and was commended in the Leaf Books Poetry Competition 2010; more recently her work was selected to open The Best of the Manchester Poets (vol.2) published by Puppywolf. In addition she contributes to journals, most notably the French Literary Review.

Ursula performs her work widely especially in venues in the North West and has broadcast her work on Radio Merseyside.