Meet the 2026 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize Winners
We are thrilled to announce the winners of the 2026 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize in Poetry, Fiction, and Life Writing.
Open to writers from around the world who have yet to publish a full-length book, the prize awards a winner in each category with £1,000 and print publication. Additionally, all eligible shortlisted writers are offered mentoring opportunities in partnership with The Literary Consultancy.
On the winners, Prize Chair Ellah Wakatama commented: ‘Judging pieces from across the globe, and in a range of genres was a challenge for me and my fellow judges; with each piece presenting an invitation to a different perspective, inflection, and voice. We were looking for ambition, originality, and urgency. The winners in each category represent the very best of these qualities.’
Introducing the Winners
Poetry
Nicole W Lee for ‘宫 / Gong ghazitsu’
‘You who prefers violence’s surprise: what of the way disquiet arrives, without notice?
The way twilight accumulates on the terrace. The refusal to accept it’s a tide 恭.’
This year's Poetry judge, Mona Kareem, commented: ‘Nicole W Lee's "宫 / Gong ghazitsu" is a poem that refuses to stand still. Its diction braids the affective, the local, and the theoretical into a single register. The voice travels – highway, river, café, courtyard – without ever losing its emotional charge. Set across two languages, a second poem surfaces adjacent to the first: each Chinese character tilts the line toward another meaning, so the whole thing opens like a set of nesting dolls, one reading tucked inside another. That doubling also clarifies the feminine centre of the poem — what read as atmosphere before now reads as body. Bodies and the spaces they occupy are under constant pressure: mortgaged, gentrified, asked to bend. The poem's tenderness and its politics arrive together, inseparable. It reaches something shared by refusing to generalise — it stays stubbornly specific, and the specificity is exactly what carries.’
Nicole W. Lee is a poet born in Sydney, Australia, to Chinese Malaysian parents. Her award-winning poems appear internationally in Adroit Journal, AGNI, Meanjin, Shenandoah, and more, and are being adapted for stage, screen, and interdisciplinary installation. She is a graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson.
Fiction
Shamima Yasmine for ‘Dispatches Investigates’
‘Endometriosis, she whispered frantically, was all the rage and sweeping the nation. It had, so far as she knew, only affected white girls, but it would no doubt reach us soon. Everything always came to us after it had happened elsewhere.’
2026 Fiction judge Santanu Bhattacharya praised the story, saying: ‘This piece takes material that is dark and full of rage, and turns it on its head with uncharacteristic youthful spunk. With great dexterity and humour, it tells the story of a generation that refuses to be failed by those who came before them.’
Shamima Yasmine is an emerging writer coming to fiction after a career in government and the UN. Her work is drawn to memory, childhood, and the textures of everyday life. She revisits growing up in Birmingham, UK, exploring how small details linger and how the past quietly informs the present.
Life Writing
Khazna Y Chami for ‘Thinking Positively’
‘The stories never end, by which I mean they never stop coming, and they are never satisfyingly resolved. For this reason, I will never understand what my father went through, much less my grandparents. I will never understand, and yet I’ll know.’
Jen Calleja, judge for the Life Writing category, commented: ‘This piece is dynamic and confident, weaving personal reflection with familial, national, and political histories. It is a heartfelt and convincing response to the shame affect conjured and wielded by institutions both governmental and educational, and exemplifies the importance of personal authenticity and bravery through life writing. The piece’s clever choice of perspective sets up the reader as both antagonist and confidante, and I’m so glad that this was our final winner.’
Khazna Y Chami is a British Lebanese writer and researcher living in the Midlands. She holds a PhD in Literary Practice from the University of Warwick.
All winning pieces will be published in print in our spring 2027 issue, Wasafiri 129. The remaining shortlisted pieces will be published on Wasafiri.org over the coming months.
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For press enquiries, or to interview our winning writers, contact Elizabeth Robertson at elizabeth.robertson@qmul.ac.uk
Cover image by Adi Goldstein on Unsplash
