Under-Represented Writers Explore 'Fears, Joys, Anxieties And Place In The World' As Winners Announced For Creative Future Writers' Awards 2026

The winners of the Creative Future Writers' Awards, the UK's only national prize for under-represented writers, were announced this week, with £25,000 in cash and development prizes shared among fifteen winning entries spanning fiction, poetry and creative non-fiction.

Now in its thirteenth year, the prize attracted more than 1,850 submissions from unpublished writers across the UK, a 16% rise on 2025. Judges described the winning work, which explores human connection, resilience, belonging and lived experience of disability and chronic illness, as "vital, radical and exciting."

The Platinum Prize for Creative Non-Fiction went to Rugby-based Maika Carrillo for Pagpag: Traces of Life and Loss, a meditation on the Filipino word's three meanings — shaking off dust, repurposing scavenged food, and ritually shaking off spirits after a wake — written after Carrillo returned to the Philippines following her father's death.

Midlands poet Alison Tanik, who began writing in her fifties, won the Platinum Prize for Poetry for Achilles leaves me in Norwood Junction, addressing the aftermath of sexual assault and a victim's choice to withhold her attacker's identity from police. Bradford writer Debbie Hudson took the Platinum Prize for Fiction with How to Dig a Warren, a first-person-plural story about young girls competing for the attention of a viral singer online.

Elsewhere, disabled writer Rebecca Faithful won Gold for Creative Non-Fiction with an account of navigating Portsmouth by wheelchair, while Leeds poet J.J. Carey took Gold for Poetry with a meditation on the Nat King Cole song Only Natural. In fiction, Abhishek Parasrampuria's The Evidence Room, centred on a bloodied cashmere jumper after a hate crime, took Gold, alongside Aisha Okorie's Blackwashed, told as a voice note from a London cleaner to her sister back home.

Since its inception the award has supported more than 165 writers, a third of whom have gone on to publish books, among them Romalyn Ante, Bethany Handley and McKitterick Prize winner Tom Newlands.

Judge Courttia Newland said writers had used the award to "explore their fears, joys, anxieties and their place in the world, at a time when this has never been more necessary." Fellow judge Nancy Campbell praised the shortlist's "courage," while Kieran Yates called reading the entries "such a joy."

The winning entries, written on the theme of 'Material', are published in an anthology available from Creative Future. An Awards Showcase takes place at the Southbank Centre's London Literature Festival on 30 October, alongside a free Writers' Day on 25 October with Service95 Book Club.