The Creative Future Writers’ Award 2025 received over 1,600 entries from underrepresented writers across the country. We sincerely thank each and every one of you for giving us a chance to read your work. We’re pleased to announce those selected:
Creative Non-Fiction
- Platinum: Ellen Rickford, Letter to Bobby
- Gold: gobscure, invisibled
- Silver: Stephanie Y. Tam, Radio Silence
- Bronze: Matt Taylor, i screamed in lowercase
- Highly Commended: Zahrah Nesbitt-Ahmed, Aminat
Shortlist: Muti’ah Badruddeen, Charlotte Dale, Manjit Dhillon, Kayley Gladwin, Maya Goel, Florence Grieve, Emily Hay, Anne Page, Sophie Sanders, Rowan Tate
Fiction
- Platinum: Laurel Hart, Actias Luna
- Gold: Eve Naden, Habitat
- Silver: Amy Leonard, A gentle nudge
- Bronze: Abu Leila, Dogs for hips
- Highly Commended: Emma Allotey, Wild Fruit
Shortlist: Aysegul Balkose, Rahela Begum-Miah, Millie Butler, Ayla Douglas, Uduak-Abasi Ekong, Emer Ni Eadhra, Sophie Stanley, Jiaxi Wang, Dana Watts, Nicholas Zegallo Tufnell
Poetry
- Platinum: Jasmin Allenspach, what makes tick / my mother
- Gold: Godelieve de Bree, 4% of the mammals on planet earth are wild
- Silver: Beatrice Feng, My Soul
- Bronze: Nathan Steward, The Three Ways I have Witnessed Creation
- Highly Commended: William Wyld, Sheds
Shortlist: Joshua Antione Phelps, Catherine Ben-Ameh, Bhumika Billa, Cynthia Bo Huen Ng, Grace Brimacombe-Rand, Miriam Max, Norman Miller, Afidi Nomo Ongolo, Jeremy Pak Nelson, Holly Shoesmith
We look forward to working with this year’s winners and furthering their careers, thanks to the generosity of our prizegivers, who contributed £20,000 in courses, development and support.
Our sincere thanks also to the judging panel: poet Nancy Campbell, journalist, broadcaster & editor Kieran Yates, Jack Hadley (Curtis Brown Creative), Beth Brambling (Faber Academy) and Aki Schilz (The Literary Consultancy).
What an honour to read new fiction, non-fiction and poetry which demonstrates such outstanding creative talent. Congratulations are due to everyone on the shortlist for their courage in submitting their work. These writers transport the reader to diverse locations and domains of experience, exploring urgent themes and challenging dominant discourse. In uncertain and precarious times language can occasionally seem inadequate to express injustice and trauma, but these compelling new voices are forging work that is vital, transformative and hopeful.
—Nancy Campbell, Award judge
It was such a joy to read these essays and get a sense of what writers are thinking about in relation to the theme, and beyond. The process encouraged me to be thoughtful, engaged and made me consider what I love about literature all over again.
—Kieran Yates, Award judge
Read this year’s winning pieces, alongside work by our judges and Writers in Residence, in our anthology: click here to pre-order your copy (shipping from 1 October 2025 onwards).
Join us to celebrate the winners at the Southbank Centre as part of the London Literature Festival on Saturday 25 October: book your ticket here. Or you can watch the event online via livestream: details here.
About the winners (in alphabetical order)
Creative Non-Fiction
Ellen Rickford lives on a boat in East London, finding inspiration in the churning mass of life – both human and otherwise – the waterways draw in. She began writing regularly eighteen months ago, finding that turning experiences and observations from a sometimes painful world into stories, made life feel altogether warmer and more colourful. Her favourite form is short fiction, especially stories that explore the intricate inner lives of flawed and complex characters, revealing the depths of human frailty and resilience.
gobscure is a mixed-media artist who has toured ‘brokenword,’ a show about their lived experience of homelessness across the UK. They were a finalist in the Arts and Homelessness international awards and have a permanent text-based mural ‘wallriot‘ at the Museum of Homelessness, London. gobscure is an associate artist at Live Theatre Newcastle, and in autumn 2025, Jason Williamson of Sleaford Mods will read their work ‘edgecity: monologues from the street‘, exploring the many unexpected facets of homelessness and street life at Live Theatre.
Stephanie Y. Tam is the daughter of immigrants, who grew up with flight in her bones: inherited from her father, who escaped poverty in Hong Kong, and her mother, who fled Communist China in the hull of a fisherman’s boat. As a radio journalist, she’s produced content for Freakonomics Radio, New York Public Radio, and BBC World Service. Her writing has been published in The Believer, The Behavioral Scientist and Slate, among others, and she won the Harper’s Bazaar Short Story Competition, was longlisted for the V.S. Pritchett Short Story Prize, and nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She holds an MA with distinction in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia.
Matt Taylor is an award-winning creative non-fiction writer, who won ‘A Writing Chance 24/25’ (Substack strand), was longlisted for Fish Publishing’s short memoir competition 2024, was Highly commended at the Life Writing prize 2021 and won Spread The Word’s Scribe UK 2021. He has been published in The Bee Literary Magazine, Cherwell and The Oxford Student. In his Substack Newsletter, ‘Underclass Hero,’ Matt invites readers into the raw, vibrant landscape of his life: navigating the care system, wrestling with class prejudice, and living in recording studios with cool bands.
Zahrah Nesbitt-Ahmed is a research and evaluation specialist focused on gender equality and inclusion. Her essays have been published in Critical Muslim and 3 of Cups Press, and her writing has been featured in New African Magazine, African Arguments, The Republic, and Selamta Magazine. For over a decade, she curated bookshy, a blog dedicated to African literature. She also edited the first two issues of the literary magazine, REWRITE Reads. In 2024, her work was shortlisted for the inaugural Fern Academy Prize for essays.
Fiction
Laurel Hart is a writer and illustrator born and raised in East Sussex. After completing a degree in English Literature and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, she has been working in museums and medieval castles, trying to befriend ravens, and telling everyone who will listen about the history of rat poison. She is currently working on her debut novel, which draws on her love of nature and all things strange and unexplainable.
Eve Naden was born in France and now lives in England. She has an English degree from the University of York and works as a Project Manager for the Civil Service, teaching English in her spare time. Diagnosed with autism in 2024, she writes to make sense of a world that’s increasingly difficult to navigate. Her work has featured in The Roadrunner Review, The Elmbridge Literary Magazine and, in 2021, she won the Zealous Short Story Competition. She hopes to become a storyliner for film and TV.
Amy Leonard is a writer from Suffolk. She gained her Bachelor’s degree in English Literature and Creative Writing from the Open University in 2024. This is the first time her work has been published. She is currently working on multiple novels simultaneously.
Abu Leila is a writer interested in love, violence and revolution. Their work, preserving family histories of anti-colonial resistance, was shortlisted for the 2024 Wasafiri New Writing Prize and won the 2024 Ghassan Kanafani Resistance Arts Prize. Their writing on sex and gender today and in the Ancient Middle East won the Bridport Prize and the London Writers Awards. They are an alumnus of Barbican Young Poets, and their poetry has been published in the Bad Betty Press anthology Field Notes on Survival, recreated as a stone carving at the Bloomsbury Festival and performed in Kolkata, India with the Queer Muslim Project. They are currently working on their first novel.
Emma Allotey has been published in Peepal Tree Press’s Oluwale Now anthology (2023) and longlisted for the Harvill Secker and Bloody Scotland BAME writer’s competition in 2021 for an excerpt of her novel Grudge. She was longlisted for the SI Leeds Prize 2012 for an excerpt of her literary novel The March of Aida. Emma studied Psychology at university and works in education.
Poetry
Jasmin Allenspach is an exophonic Swiss writer and award-winning physicist living in London. Speaking seven languages, she writes in English, despite her mother tongue being Swiss German, and her poetry explores multilingualism, sexism, science, and severed roots, both metaphorical and literal. She is a Young Trustee of the London Library, where she was formerly an Emerging Writer, a Barbican Young Poet, a Tin House Scholar (USA), and runs an international writers’ workshop. When not dissecting words or equations, Jasmin trains in classical ballet.
Godelieve de Bree is a poet and critic based in London who has been published in Propel, TATE and fourteen poems. Her critical work has featured in Poetry London, The London Magazine, and LARB.
Beatrice Feng is an agender, aroace poet from Changshu, China. Their work has appeared in Wilderness House Literary Review, Writing Disorder, The Wordarium Journal and other literary journals and magazines. They hold a BA in English Literature, Creative Writing and Practice from Lancaster University and are currently pursuing an MA in Poetry at the University of East Anglia.
Nathan Steward is from the Cotswolds and currently studying English and Creative Writing at the University of Exeter where he is a fiction editor for the University’s literary journal, and the Editor In Chief of the arts and culture magazine. He has won the InFocus Short Story Competition, been shortlisted for the HG Wells Short Story Competition and the Young Walter Scott Fiction Prize and has been commended twice in the Writers of the Future Contest.
William Wyld is a poet and artist from London. They are a Poetry Archive Now winner, were highly commended in the Bridport Prize, and have performed widely including at the Queen Elizabeth Hall alongside the London Philharmonic Orchestra. William’s poetry has appeared in Propel, Basket, Lighthouse, Queer Life Queer Love II and elsewhere, and their paintings have been exhibited at the Royal Academy Summer Show and Discerning Eye. William’s scenery and costumes have appeared in film, museum and theatre installations across the UK.
The 2026 competition will open in mid-January. Details will be published on our website in due course; sign up for our newsletter to stay up to date.
