Creative Future Writers’ Awards 2024 Prize For Under-Represented Writers Announces Winners

The winners of the prestigious Creative Future Writers’ Awards (CFWA), the UK’s only national awards for all underrepresented writers, who traditionally lack opportunities due to mental health issues, disability, identity, health or social circumstance, were announced today.

Now in its eleventh year, the Prize attracted a record 1,600 submissions from unpublished writers from around the UK, a 19% increase on 2023 and a 53% increase on five years ago.

For the first time in the Awards' history, there are 15 prize winners, with the highest prize fund ever of £23,000 and top writing development prizes that the winners will share to advance their writing careers.

Gender identity, betrayal, rites of passage and lived experiences of transition, cancer treatment, and being in care are among the themes explored in the fifteen winning entries across fiction, creative non-fiction, and poetry.

The Platinum Prize for Creative Non-Fiction was won by Louis Bailey from Derbyshire for The Nightjar (excerpt from ‘The Night Run’), a powerful personal story about transition and embracing new ways of being – and of being seen. Blending memoir and nature writing, Bailey feels a kinship with the enigmatic nightjars he encounters on a post-surgery nighttime run, ‘deep-stealth creatures’ camouflaged to blend in with their environment and avoid detection.

The Platinum Prize for Poetry has been awarded to twenty-five-year-old writer and theatre director Maya Little from Oxfordshire for Childe of Hale, her beautifully nostalgic poem exploring the enduring power of myth and memory in the face of change and loss.

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British-Irish writer Patrick Cash has won the Platinum Prize for Fiction for Kai, an affecting and nuanced short story exploring queer identity, vulnerability, and prejudice, as an A level student forms a relationship with his deaf drug dealer, uncovering an unexpected tenderness beneath his tough exterior.

The Award, with its highly successful track record for discovering and nurturing emerging talent, has changed the lives of over one hundred writers, breaking down barriers and giving them a huge boost towards publication and writing career. One third of all previous winners now have books published. Previous winners include Kirsty Capes, bestselling author of Girls (2024) and Careless, which was longlisted for the Women’s Prize 2022, poet Romalyn Ante who was named an Open Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and Tom Newlands, whose debut novel Only Here, Only Now (2024) was a Guardian Book of the Day.

The 2024 Creative Future Writers’ Award winners are:

CREATIVE NON-FICTION:
Platinum: The Nightjar (excerpt from ‘The Night Run’) by Louis Bailey
Gold: A Space That Speaks by Ciara McVeigh
Silver: Flowers Don’t Wither, Portraits Don’t Bleed by Shwetha Bai
Bronze: Fox and Me by Kaylia Dunstan
Highly Commended:Monobrow by Vanita Parti

POETRY:
Platinum: Childe of Hale by Maya Little
Gold: Karst by Rona Luo
Silver: Dig Up Black Boy Bones from Brown by Francis-Xavier Mukiibi
Bronze: Graduation Dinner by Lara Mae Simpson
Highly Commended: Mother Fregoli by Kasmira Kincaid

FICTION:
Platinum: Kai by Patrick Cash
Gold: Àlàdé Must Die by Ibrahim Babátúndé Ibrahim
Silver: Prayers by Sophia Khan
Bronze: Bungalow by Melanie Banim
Highly Commended: Diamond and Pearl by Harper Walton

Two writers who had never entered a literary competition before, Shwetha Bai and Vanita Parti, have won awards in the Creative Non-Fiction category, which was introduced in 2023 to widen opportunities and scope for under-represented writers. Shwetha Bai’s Flowers Don’t Wither, Portraits Don’t Bleed explores taboos and cultural practices around menstruation in an Indian household, while beauty industry pioneer and founder of Blink Brow Bars, Vanita Parti’s piece Monobrow centres on a mother and teenage daughter bonding over beauty rituals. Kaylia Dunstan’s Fox and Me is a searingly honest account of cancer treatment and recovery and a moving meditation on mortality, while Ciara McVeigh explores a compulsive behaviour rooted in anxiety and the tentative beginnings of self-acceptance in A Space That Speaks.

Two humorous stories have triumphed in the Fiction Category, Àlàdé Must Die by Ibrahim Babátúndé Ibrahim, where a taboo-busting dare unleashes chaos in a Nigerian market, and Sophia Khan’s Prayers where a man has his Gucci loafers stolen by a policeman guarding his mosque during Eid. In Harper Walton’s story Diamond and Pearl, a young video game store worker explores gender identity online before finding the courage to live authentically in real life. Trust and betrayal are examined in Melanie Banim’s atmospheric story Bungalow, as a young girl is abused by her uncle at her sick grandmother’s home.

Twenty-one-year-old Lara Mae Simpson is 2024’s youngest Award winner. Their poem Graduation Dinner about family pressure to hide a queer relationship and a longing for freedom has won Bronze in the Poetry category. Other winners in this category are: Kasmira Kincaid, the first ever care leaver to graduate from Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, whose poem Mother Fregoli captures the repetitive experience of being shuttled between foster homes and expected to start again; Rona Luo whose poem Karst provides a glimpse of everyday life in a small-town on the cusp of modernisation; and Francis-Xavier Mukiibi, a North London poet of Ugandan heritage, for Dig Up Black Boy Bones from Brown, a meditation on race.

The winning submissions, alongside work by the 2024 Award judges, are published in an anthology which can be purchased from Creative Future.

Judging the Creative Future Awards this year was an invigorating and challenging process. The shortlist of many innovative writers offered a glimpse of some of the most exciting writing being produced in the UK today. In the Poetry and Fiction categories, writers boldly pushed boundaries of genre and form. In Creative Non-Fiction, there was an incredible range of stories and voices covering subjects I'd not encountered before. I was drawn all the way in and longed to keep reading. It's been a joy and an honour to be involved in this prize that is helping to reshape our literary landscape.

I like bands’ initial albums, and I like artists at the start of their careers. I like seeing footballers stepping into the first team for the first time, and I like watching debut directors at the movies. It’s invigorating to me to see raw talent finding its way, in this way - that often, initial burst of ambition, and excitement - the kernel of a voice emerging, the level of risk practitioners are free to take at this stage. No wonder the process of judging Creative Future was such a source of joy - the originality and imagination, the vocabulary of these newcomers, crikey!’

The additional judges were prize partners Joey Connolly (Faber Academy), Tessa Foley (Poetry School), Jennifer Kerslake (Curtis Brown Creative), and Aki Schilz (The Literary Consultancy.)

An Awards Ceremony featuring the winning writers and head judges will take place at the Southbank Centre’s London Literature Festival on Saturday 26th October at 7.30pm. Tickets are available from the Southbank Centre website, and the event will also be livestreamed.

Creative Future will host its popular FREE Writers’ Day on Sunday 27th, at the Southbank Centre and live streamed where writers, publishers, and literary professionals will share tips and initiatives in a day of talks and panel events. For more information, please see Creative Future Writers' Day – Southbank Centre.

Alongside the £23,000 worth of cash and top writing development prizes supplied by prominent publishers, authors and development agencies, the winners are offered training, mentoring and support. Since the Awards inception, Creative Future has stayed in regular contact with all previous award winners, creating supportive, nurturing relationships which enable under-represented writers to thrive, build on the confidence garnered as a result of their award, and develop their careers.