New Writing Prize

In this short story by Emma Oldham, the Australian sun is its own overbearing, brutal character, beating down especially on poorer and Aboriginal communities. The story follows the narrator's relationship to the heat and her complicated, uneven entanglement with a richer white man, who offers both 'pleasure and climactic relief' in his air-conditioned home. This piece was shortlisted for the 2025 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize.

In this interview with Ellah Wakatama, Chair of the Judges of the 2026 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize, she discusses the role of literary prizes, the importance of translated literature, and the qualities that make a creative work stand out for her.

'I’m not saying, hey, imagine, what if it was you. / I’m saying it is you' — this poem by Sarah Lasoye collapses the distances between us, where complicity and silence breed and hinder true connection and solidarity. The poem was shortlisted for the 2025 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize.

In this vulnerable piece of life writing teeming with a distinct sense of voice, Mistale Taylor writes about her epilepsy and how each episode leaves her finding her way back to herself. Woven through past instances of her seizures are musings on the language, art, treatment, and wording around being an epileptic woman — 'for the past fourteen years, part of me has been trying to assign something meaningful to the condition.'  This piece was shortlisted for the 2025 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize.

In this piece of short historical fiction, Rajiv Ramkhalawan narrates the journey of an unnamed Indian man arriving in Trinidad, where he is forced into becoming an indentured labourer on a sugarcane plantation, subject to vile abuse and violence from 'de white man'. Through the course of the story, we glimpse a portrait of how the approximately 150,000 Indian workers who arrived on the island from 1845-1917 led their everyday lives. This piece was shortlisted for the 2025 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize.

Reem Abbas's prose-poem is bookended by two encounters at the airport immigration counter. Throughout this text, experiences, language, and silence of a 'survivor of nationality' are played with to mirror how an immigrant must adapt their voice to their environment. This piece was shortlisted for the 2025 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize.

Jen Calleja is the Life Writing judge for the 2026 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize. In this essay, she shares the inspiring roadmap that led to the creation of her memoir, Fair: The Life-Art of Translation, and the importance of embarking on a wide-ranging, deep, and unique research journey for creating your own work of life writing.

This life writing piece by Dani Salvadori is a work of prose-poetry about the 'menoflân' – an older, menopausal flâneuse – moving through a ceaseless, beating city such as London, where 'the grammar of the city is movement'. As she slips through various streets and situations, the menoflân asserts a profound understanding and possession of the place she is in. This piece was shortlisted for the 2025 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize.

In this moving short story by Jaden Morton, a young person grows up in rural Norfolk with their family, slowly casting off the alienating binds of boyhood towards a different gender and identity, the eroding coastline an ever-present part of their narrative. This piece was shortlisted for the 2025 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize.

Indian novelist Santanu Bhattacharya is the Fiction judge for the 2026 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize. In this essay, he shares his guidance on staying true to the global majority story you want to tell, based off his own experiences and reflections as a published author in an industry that continues to greedily capitalise on 'diversity'.

Palestinian writer Malak N Hijazi's life writing piece reflects on growing up in Gaza — the realities of white phosphorus raining down on your school, watching the weight fall rapidly off your body, losing a childhood friend, noting the olive-coloured eyes of a soldier. Existing here means existing 'in disappearance', amid the systematic extermination of your people. This piece was Highly Commended for the 2025 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize.

Bulgarian writer Kamelia Panayotova's vivid, sensuous novel excerpt 'Ánne' – translated by Dilyana Kodjamanova – steeps in sunlit village summers, girlhood, and the complicated yearning for a mother figure. This piece was shortlisted for the 2025 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize.

Naomi Madlock's poem brings a body with disabilities to a riverbank, where nature's streams of unexpected ruins and treasures – 'a flap of algae', 'domestic waste', 'sunlight/seeping through a porcelain shard' – assemble a sense of wholeness and peace. This piece was shortlisted for the 2025 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize.

In Raluca David's life writing piece, colonies of mould settle into her family's various apartments – from the UK to Germany – mirroring a growingly hostile, anti-immigrant atmosphere. This piece was shortlisted for the 2025 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize.

In this life writing piece shortlisted for the 2024 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize, Sarah Anjum Bari explores matrilineal relationships, patriarchal expectations, obedience, and rebellion for South Asian girls — and how hair can be at the root of it all.

Simon Peter Eggertsen was shortlisted for the 2024 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize in Poetry for a poem imagining the experiences of a nineteenth-century slave.

Kate Hawkes – shortlisted for the 2024 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize in Fiction – explores the grief and 'river' of memory within a relationship transformed by illness.

In this poem, Juleus Ghunta – shortlisted for the 2024 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize in Poetry – juxtaposes the ordinary lives of his peers with his sister's suicidal ideation. The 2025 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize is open until 30 June 2025. Read the full guidelines and submit your work.

Both a novelist and translator, Anton Hur – Fiction judge for the 2025 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize – discusses the varied experiences between writing and translating fiction, and how each role is treated in a book's production process.

'This is the problem with anecdotes: they are so ambiguously weighted. They might say nothing or they might say everything' — Life Writing judge for the 2025 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize, Noreen Masud, talks about the value of the anecdote when writing about one's life.

Ark Ramsay's Life Writing piece – shortlisted for the 2024 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize –  immerses itself in a knotty quest to 'outpace gender'.

Jack Joslin – shortlisted for the 2024 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize in Fiction – mixes white lies with white ghosts in a sharply-paced schoolboy story.

Zainab Imran – shortlisted for the 2024 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize in Poetry – examines the UK's rejection of Shamima Begum as a citizen, its repercussions reverberating through the narrator's life.

This life writing piece by Alex Mormoris – shortlisted for the 2024 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize – reflects on Jamaican diasporic experience and Windrush history, punctuated by the music of Tom Jones.