First Novel Award 2026 Winners

We're excited to announce our First Novel Award prize winners, chosen by our judges from an impressive 1,450 entries!

As well as our overall winner and runner up, we have a Highly Commended entry, our Bookseller’s Choice Award and our BPA Most Promising Talent Award.

Learn more about each author and their novel, and read an extract from their work!

Winner

Susannah Bond

Gold, Kimchi and Yellow Silk

Literary Family Saga

£1,500 + agent introduction

Susannah is a Korean foundling. After being discovered outside a laundry, she was taken by a policeman to a convent. Months later she was adopted by an English family and lived in Brussels, Berlin and Paris.

When Susannah retired from commercial law, she studied writing on the six-month Curtis Brown Creative course and the Jericho Writers Ultimate Novel Writing course. Gold, Kimchi and Yellow Silk is a fictional reimagining of her start in life and was shortlisted for The Book Edit Writers’ Prize 2025 and won the 2026 Blue Pencil First Novel Award. 

Susannah lives in London with her family.

Instagram: @susannahjsbond

Pitch: In 1964 South Korea, a servant's determination to end her family's cycle of maternal abandonment sets in motion a chain of secrets that will shape three generations of women.

Opening paragraph of Gold, Kimchi and Yellow Silk:

"South Korea, Yun-Dae, Spring 1964

It was the perfect day to forsake the child. Or so I told Chun-ja. She’d already been away from Yun-Dae far too long.

Hiding behind a cherry tree, I scanned the marketplace. Everything was still, too early even for the mountain doves. Through gritted teeth, I urged sleepy workers to rush their breakfast of bean sprout soup and hurry from behind closed doors to fill the town. Thankfully we’d chosen market day and stall owners were coaxing orange glows from their coal burners and preparing mandu to simmer in huge black pans.

Chun-ja walked towards the police station with a cardboard box in her arms. No one wasted a glance at her."

Runner-up

Alice Twemlow

Observation Error 

Literary

£500 + agent introduction

Alice is former member of the International Writers Collective in Amsterdam and, now that she lives in London, a frequent participant in lectures and courses offered by the Faber Academy, Arvon and the Blue Pencil Agency. Her poems have been published in the Fish Anthology (2021) and the Stone Circle Review (2024). Alice is an Associate Professor at the Kingston School of Art, Kingston University. 

Pitch: In Amsterdam, grieving widow Emily Jacobs is barely keeping her life afloat when a flooded apartment, an uncertain romance and a reclusive survivor of a deadly historic flood force her to confront the secrets and self-destructive habits keeping her trapped.

Opening paragraph of Observation Error:

"At this time of year, mornings are just the ragged hems of nights. By the time it gets light, it’s almost too late.

Someone told me it can help to light a candle.

In the kitchen I pull open the drawer where we stash the unregistered supermarket bonus cards, orphaned power cords, a fridge magnet bust of Pythagoras, minus the magnet. Not so long ago it seemed to us that overnight all this kipple would self-reproduce. These days the jumble barely moves, let alone spawns toward entropy. The drawer is hushed and reverent. Each kipplet now a relic. This pebble, curator of the last beach walk. This dried-up biro, resin for a fingerprint. At the back of the drawer, the serrated rim of a plastic disc—a Connect Four counter, perhaps—and beyond it, there, yes, something waxy. I pull out a stray birthday cake candle. Its little striped neck has snapped; head wilts from its wick. I twizzle it, letting the upper half fly wildly around for a moment. Then I put it back in the drawer."

Highly Commended

Isabella Peralta

Comets 

Upmarket Speculative Romance

Isabella Peralta is a Manila-born writer and educator. Her work, which explores identity, belonging, and love, has been listed for the Lucy Cavendish Fiction Prize, the SI Leeds Literary Prize, the Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize, the 4thWrite Prize, the Bloomsbury Mentorship Programme, and the Blue Pencil Agency First Novel Award. She holds an MSt in Creative Writing (Distinction) from the University of Cambridge and is an alumna of Faber Academy and the HarperCollins Author Academy. She was recently part of the 2025/2026 cohort of The London Library Emerging Writers Programme and the 2026 cohort of Grow Your Story with Hachette UK's THRIVE. Instagram: @isabellaperalta

Pitch: Her shortlisted novel, Comets, follows a bookseller and a scientist who meet at a train station in London — eight months before a comet is set to destroy Earth. They grow close over chance meetings and late nights across the city, talking about science, faith, loneliness, and belonging. But is it worth pursuing love in a world that might have no future at all?

Opening paragraph of Comets:

"Before the world ends, their paths collide. He notices her first; she’s standing beside him on the same train platform, body engulfed by a crimson coat.

Thick gray clouds brew above the station. The morning air prickles their skin. Behind them, a woman sobs into her phone. A man mumbles something about God and the demise of humanity.

But before they can find out why — before doomsday is officially declared and panic plagues the planet we call home — the world goes about its day, the televisions blaring highlights of yesterday’s New Year’s Eve parties, the talk show hosts droning on and on about conspiracy theories and anti-aging cream and everything but death by comet.

Then slowly, as the news reaches breakfast tables and office cubicles and lovers’ lips, the world wakes up."

Shortlisted

Matthew Vickery

Loch Assynt 

Mystery

Originally from the Scottish Highlands, Matt previously worked as a journalist covering war and humanitarian issues in countries like Iraq, Syria, Ukraine and the occupied Palestinian territories. After failing to solve even one war, he swapped conflict for coconuts and moved to Mauritius where tropical island life has found him drinking too much coffee and furiously writing fiction with questionable results. Once in a while he confuses the rest of the island by donning a kilt and looking proud about it.

Pitch: Terminally-ill Lewis Gunn returns to the Highlands with one final hope before he dies: to discover why his son Archie vanished fifteen years ago.

Opening paragraph of Loch Assynt:

"The wind catches her ashes and I see her once more. She’s gliding across the black water of Loch Assynt, spreading her hands, touching the waves, doing one last search for our son.

God, I hope I’m wrong. I hope for all these years she was the one who was right.

“I’m sorry,” I tell Eilidh as she leaves me alone on the shoreline. Because now she’s at peace, I can finally search for my own.""

Shortlisted

Hannah Sӧlweling Vanderman 

She Walked on Water 

Historical

Hannah Sölweling Vanderman is a historical fiction writer based in Weybridge.  Her shortlisted manuscript, She Walked on Water, follows the girl who inadvertently triggered Sweden’s worst witch hunt, which took the lives of 300 people in the seventeenth-century. She first uncovered this dark chapter of Sweden’s past whilst researching at Cambridge University and the Uppsala archives twenty years ago - and never got over it.  Hannah is currently on sabbatical from teaching where she is finishing the novel and planning the rest of the trilogy.  When she is not writing, she plays tennis, evaluates tinned fish and swims in cold water. 

Pitch: Based on a true story, a seemingly trivial scuffle between two children over a lump of rye bread sparks a deadly witch hunt in Sweden which lasts a decade.

Opening paragraph of She Walked on Water:

"When the fourth distinct symphony of snoring started up, Eric Ericsson knew that it was safe to move. He swung his awkward, adolescent body carefully out of the blankets and descended from his bunk bed, taking care not to tread too close to his notoriously light-sleeping mother. Cautiously and carefully, he wove past his brothers. They lay tumbled together under a twisted sheet on the floor - their daytime grappling temporarily at a truce. The final obstacle was his baby sister - sound asleep in a pulled-out kitchen drawer just a foot from the door. Though Eric knew it was a risk, one that could upend weeks of careful planning, he could not resist bending down to stroke her warm, globular cheek. Holding onto the doorhandle for balance, his bare feet explored the cold floorboards - warm soles seeking out the familiar shape of his clogs before easing themselves in."

BPA Most Promising Talent Award

John Hollingworth

Three Seasons of Fever 

Historical Crime £250

John Hollingworth read English at Trinity College Dublin, trained as an actor at RADA and is completing a Creative Writing MA at Royal Holloway, where he is a Bradley de Glehn scholar. As a playwright his work includes Multitudes for the Kiln Theatre, directed by Indhu Rubasingham, and the book for the original musical Songs From the Seven Hills at Sheffield Theatres. As an actor he is best known for work in period dramas such as Napoleon, The Crown, Gentleman Jack, Poldark, Da Vinci’s Demons and The Hour. Writing historical fiction seemed the obvious choice. As a novelist he is unrepresented.

@hollingworthworth

Pitch: In cholera-ravaged British India in 1895, a grief-stricken doctor and a white-passing Anglo-Indian teacher uncover a deadly vaccination conspiracy targeting biracial people.

Opening paragraph of Three Seasons of Fever:

"The man with the axe in his back feels only the sharp pain between his shoulder blades. He reaches for, but fails to grasp, the haft of the thing. His fingers are slippery with blood. He is breathless from running. It must have been thrown, he thinks, marvelling at the force of the act. He slumps to the forest floor, pine needles pricking his knees, the powdering of snow under the boughs irregular and uneven. It seems almost impolite to die in the afternoon, the sort of thing that the English wouldn’t approve of."

Bookseller's Choice Award

Jade Hughes

Yon Time 

Literary Coming-of-age

£50 + a bespoke bookseller bundle of books

Jade Hughes is a Glaswegian fiction writer with a background in theatre. Her work explores nostalgia, memory, and the ordinary lives of extraordinary people. Her Scots-language story Museum ae The Morra won The Sunday Post Short Story Competition 2025, and her work has appeared in PS magazine and From Glasgow to Saturn. She recently completed an MLitt in Creative Writing at the University of Glasgow and is currently finishing her debut novel, Yon Time. 

Instagram: @jadakix

Pitch: In early-2000s Glasgow, fifteen-year-old Bex spends one defining summer caught between the pull of a notorious young gang and an unlikely friendship with the boy next door. As loyalties are tested and loss begins to unravel her sense of belonging, the world she thought she knew starts to fracture.

Opening paragraph of Yon Time:

"A’m standin in the hall, in front ae the full-length mirror when the bryl cream starts tae set. It’s looking class. Aw stiff n shiny, laying flat against ma scalp n gleaming like wet silk. A scoop another haunful ae the slippery blue magic n slather it on the sides, using Karen’s fine-toothed comb tae distribute it evenly, n tame any flyaways. Once A’m sleek enough, A gather the ends n twist them intae a tight bun, securing it wae a canary leather scrunchie that Karenbought me fae the beauty section ae the chemist. She said it wid go wae the yellow hood on ma new jaiket."

An equally hearty congratulations to all our longlisted authors below:

We wish to thank our judges, literary agent Olivia Maidment and author Freya Bromley, for their time and expertise throughout the competition.

BPA partner Frances Merivale has written a blog about reading the shortlist, reflecting on why these five novels made it so far, regardless of our editors' personal tastes, and sharing advice on how you can improve your chances in future writing competitions.

Our Pitch Prize closes at midnight on Sunday 1 November. Enter for another chance to get your work in front of literary agents, with this year's judges, Kat Aitken and Seren Adams of Lexington Literary Agency.