2026 Finalists Announced!

Shortlisted for the 2024 Nota Bene Prize, The Centre follows a budding young translator to a mysterious language centre where fluency comes at a chilling cost.

Shortlisted for the 2024 Nota Bene Prize, Disturbance is a razor-sharp debut that explores all the ways that relationships and trauma can haunt our lives.

Meet the judges! A writer, born and raised in Kent, her debut novel Spoilt Creatures won the BPA Pitch Prize and was longlisted for the Mslexia Novel Competition.

Shortlisted for the 2024 Nota Bene Prize, Chrysalis by Anna Metcalfe is an unnerving, compelling and utterly contemporary debut novel about one woman's metamorphosis into an online phenomenon.

Meet the judges! As well as penning two novels, Onyi founded Black Pens, the UK’s first writing retreat for Black womxn, and co-founded Surviving Out Loud.

A tender and lyrical debut that effortlessly nails both the exhilarating rush and trepidation of first love, Daverley's debut charts the burgeoning romance between Will and Rosie.

Drenched in suspense and populated with richly drawn characters, Walsh’s atmospheric thriller follows three old friends reunited in their hometown on the Irish West Coast as chilling secrets from their past start to unravel.

Meet the judges! Zeynep runs a printing company and a bookstagram account, and in 2024, she was named the Women’s Prize Discoveries Scholar.