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30 January 2025

2025 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize: Open for Submissions

Since 2009, the Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize has been awarded to some of the most exciting new voices in life writing, poetry, and fiction from around the world. The sixteenth edition of the prize brings an exciting new development as we open to entries in translation – across all three categories –  for the first time since the prize was founded by Dr. Susheila Nasta. We are pleased to share that the 2025 edition of the prize is now open for entries until 11.59pm BST on 30 June, 2025.


Representing more of the globe than any other prize of its kind, the prize supports writers who have not yet published book-length works, with no limits on age, gender, nationality, or background. The winners of each category will receive a £1,000 cash prize and publication in Wasafiri magazine; if a work in translation wins, the cash prize will be split equally between the author and translator. 

Wasafiri's Editor and Publishing Director Sana Goyal said: 'We’re thrilled to open the Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize to works in translation for the first time. Wasafiri was founded in the spirit of recognising the largest possible literary community, and taking this next step is necessary in continuing our work in provoking cross-cultural dialogue, bolstering reading and writing across borders, in service of imagining newer, diverse possibilities for belonging. Translation is a vital act of understanding and meaning making. We know that many writers are translators, too, and recognise all translators as writers. The Prize’s global sensibility – which will be enhanced by being open to works in translation – contributes something unique to the larger literary prize landscape. We’re looking forward to travelling the world via the word, in whatever language it is in, and further widening our international scope and original mission.' 

All winners and shortlisted writers will be offered the Chapter and Verse or Free Reads mentoring scheme in partnership with The Literary Consultancy (dependent on eligibility), as well as a one-year print subscription to Wasafiri. 

Past winners and shortlistees of the New Writing Prize include the likes of Akwaeke Emezi, Caleb Femi, and Louise Kennedy, who have gone on to score deals with major international publishing houses such as Penguin, Bloomsbury, and Hachette. They have further gone on to be shortlisted for and win prizes including the Women's Prize for Fiction, the Forward Prizes, and the Bocas Poetry Prize, among many others.


This year's multi-award-winning judges are Romesh Gunesekera (Chair), Anton Hur (Fiction)Noreen Masud (Life Writing), and Yasmine Seale (Poetry).    

The 2025 prize will be chaired by acclaimed writer Romesh Gunesekera, who says opening the prize up to entries in translation is ‘a fascinating development’ and he is 'delighted to join a wonderful panel of judges and looking forward to discovering new voices for Wasafiri'. An experienced judge of literary prizes, Romesh has a long association with Wasafiri, and was previously a judge in the Fiction category.  

Romesh will be joined by a truly remarkable panel of multi-award-winning poets and authors.  

Life Writing judge Noreen Masud is ‘so excited to find writing which showcases original, challenging, unexpected voices and viewpoints — which allows genuinely new ways of looking and thinking into the world'. 

Fiction judge Anton Hur says new writing ‘has to be new’, noting that ‘while every piece of new writing comes from a tradition built by older writing, it can't sound too much like what has come before’ and asks entrants to ‘trust your own voice and see where it takes you, hopefully to a place none of us have ever been to. A writer must first be an explorer. I wish you well on your journey and look forward to the stories you will tell.’ 

For Yasmine Seale, a former winner in the Poetry category, it is ‘a singular pleasure to be judging this prize in the year it opens up to poetry in translation. Whether or not they began life in English, I am hoping for poems that listen as much as they speak, that vibrate with other voices, that sing across distance.' Yasmine is looking for ‘poems that bend and stretch the language. Poems that make something happen'. 

Read the terms and conditions and enter the prize here.

 

 

About the judges  

Romesh Gunesekera, FRSL, is internationally acclaimed for fiction that explores the key themes of our times — political, ecological, economic — through novels and stories of wide appeal. His fiction over the last thirty years includes Reef, shortlisted for the Booker prize in 1994, and The Match, the ground-breaking cricket novel. He has chaired the Commonwealth Short Story Prize and the Gratiaen Prize in Sri Lanka. He has also judged Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists (in 2013), as well as the Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award and the 2024 International Booker Prize. 

Anton Hur is the author of Toward Eternity and the translator of Bora Chung’s Cursed Bunny, Baek Sehee’s I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki, Lee Seong-bok’s Indeterminate Inflorescence, Kyung-Sook Shin’s Violets, and others. He was double-longlisted and shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, a finalist for the National Book Award, and nominated for the Dublin Literary Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He resides in Seoul. 

Noreen Masud is a Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Bristol, and an AHRC/BBC New Generation Thinker. Her memoir-travelogue, A Flat Place (Hamish Hamilton [Penguin] and Melville House Press, 2023), was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction, the Sunday Times Charlotte Aitken Trust Young Writer of the Year Award, the Jhalak Prize, the RSL Ondaatje Prize, and the Books are my Bag Reader Awards. 

Yasmine Seale is a British-Syrian poet, translator, and critic. Her writing has appeared in Harper’s, The Paris Review, Times Literary Supplement, Apollo, and elsewhere. Among her translations from Arabic are The Annotated Arabian Nights (W. W. Norton), described by the New Yorker as 'an electric new translation', and Something Evergreen Called Life (Action Books), a collection of poems by the Sudanese writer and activist Rania Mamoun. She lives between Paris and New York, where she is a Visiting Professor at Columbia University. 

Photo credits: Romesh Gunesekera – Chris Dawes ©, Anton Hur – Anton Hur ©, Noreen Masud – Noreen Masud ©, Yasmine Seale – Marie d’Origny © 


Photo by Art Lasovsky on Unsplash

. Jonathan Cape Beautiful City

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