Emerging Writer Award 2026 Winner
Annie Hayter was born in a paddling-pool in South London, beneath a waning Cancer moon. They delight in writing about queer transcendence and flatulent saints. Annie is working on a first novel about the man, the woman, the iconoclast – Pope Joan – set in a medieval hinterland, reckoning with genderflux, longing and unholy institutions.
Annie won the Galley Beggar Press Short Story Prize, as well as BBC Proms Young Poet. They came third in Cúirt New Writing Prize for Poetry and were shortlisted for Desperate Literature Prize and The White Review’s Poet’s Prize. They write reviews for The Big Issue and have performed at the Forward Prizes, Barbican Southbank Centre and on Radio 3.
As a workshop facilitator, Annie runs creative projects in care homes, hospital wards, schools, and shelters. Their practice is dedicated to making spaces of listening, affirmation and imaginative possibility. You can read more about this here.
Second Place Finalist
Katie Webster is from Caithness, where she works as an occupational therapist. She has a degree in Hispanic Studies & Theatre Studies from the University of Glasgow, and is preoccupied with writing into the quirks of language and dialect, magical realism and disability history. She has a love of dictionaries, particularly Scots and neurological. She has had stories published in Extra Teeth Issue 9 and New Writing Scotland 30 and 41. She also has another story forthcoming in New Writing Scotland 44. She is working very hard on her first novel.
Highly Commended
Ruth Bushi is a freelance writer from Cumbria, and a teller of tall tales. In 2025, her story The Honeymoon placed first in the Bridport Prize, and in 2026, she was runner-up in the Arvon Winter Tales short story competition. Her fiction favours the speculative, strange, or cynical, and has previously been shortlisted for an Arvon Award and twice longlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. She writes about film and fiction storytelling at thehaughtyculturist.com, and is author of Decoding “The Turn of the Screw”.
Phoebe Smith is a writer based in Glasgow, originally from the Isle of Coll. She recently graduated with an MLitt in Creative Writing from the University of Glasgow. She is currently working on a novel set on an island and a pamphlet-length text about eating and exercise neuroses. At the moment, some of her favourite writers are Annie Ernaux, Gwendoline Riley, and Don DeLillo. She is interested in the kind of writing that accesses rarely expressed levels of honesty.