Emerging Writer Award 2025 Winner
Amy Luxton is a writer based in Yorkshire. She has a degree in English and Creative Writing from Lancaster University and is a member of the northern-based Writing Squad. She participated in Writer’s Block North East in 2020 and her work was shortlisted for the 2023 Arvon Award with the Northern Writers’ Awards. Amy writes historical fiction and enjoys creating stories about people whose everyday lives are affected by wider historical events, as well as exploring unique settings and professions from the past. She has also written a number of ghost stories, both historical and contemporary. Her current project is set in eighteenth-century Yorkshire and explores themes of superstition and betrayal in a small coastal community.
Second-Place Finalist
David Cochrane is a writer from Manchester currently living in Edinburgh.
He’s been writing things down since he was a child. As an adult he writes fiction, essays and occasional poetry. He writes about the breaks in human relations, our unspoken desires, and the difficulty in saying goodbye and is currently working on his first collection of short stories.
Recent publications include prose for Stallman Gallery (Berlin) and the Fruitmarket Gallery (Edinburgh) publication ‘Words and Things’ as well as essays for the Boiler House press anthologies; ‘Fieldwork’ and ‘Like the Sea I think’.
Highly Commended
Emanuelle Degli Esposti is a linguist, social scientist, and anthropologist who has long been fascinated by the stories we tell ourselves and others, and the truths that they both elucidate and hide in equal measure. As an academic, she is interested in exploring diversity, secularism, and social conflict, and has experience of conducting fieldwork in Europe, the Middle East, and the Balkans. She also has several years’ experience in journalism, consultancy, and intelligence, and her work has appeared in a variety of media and peer-reviewed publications. She has always wanted to write fiction, but has never pursued it fully, until now.
Catrin Kemp (she/her) is an emerging writer and award-winning creative producer. Her writing intersects matrescence, identity, grief and midlife, aiming to give voice to modern-day interior experiences seen through a darkly comic female lens. Her short fiction and poetry have been published by Speculative Books and Motherlore Magazine and she regularly performs her work to audiences in Glasgow.
As a creative producer, Catrin founded and is the director of The New Mothers’ Writing Circle, a groundbreaking project which seeks to ventilate narratives of motherhood and empower women and non-binary people to talk and write about the myriad experiences of modern mothering.
Catrin has been based in Glasgow since 2009.
Rachel Anderson is a writer and historian based in Newcastle upon Tyne. She recently completed a PhD in History at Durham University, where her research focused on the impact of plague in northern England and Edinburgh. Rachel is currently working on her debut novel inspired by her academic research. As a newcomer to creative writing, she was grateful to be recognised as a runner up in the 2024 Writers and Artists Working Class Writers Award and shortlisted for the ‘A Writing Chance’ programme produced by New Writing North and Faber & Faber. Rachel’s writing explores themes of gender, history, resilience and the human response to crisis.