The Martha Mills Young Writers’ Prize 2025: the Winners!
Posted by the Bookshop
In this third year of the prize, we were again overwhelmed with the number of entries. And the overall standard remained very high, which made the judging terribly difficult. We looked again for novelty of treatment and writing flair in approaching this year’s theme – ‘A New World’ – and could not have been more impressed.
Our three winners, who will each receive £200 and a selection of books, are Erioluwa Babatunde, Rosa Caughie and Nellie Rosenthal. Congratulations to all three!
Our runners-up, whose stories will appear in the prize pamphlet alongside the winners, are Shayan Anjum, Rahel Edemariam Dwan, Anna Gardiner, Dasha Hariri, Lucy Hemingway, Aanya Jain, Lily Matthews, Lily-Rose Salhany, Malena Sievers Mayo, Zoe Smith and Noa Spencer-Brown.
Frank Cottrell-Boyce, one of this year’s judges, said:
‘We have it in our power, Tom Paine said, to begin the World again. Well, that’s good to hear because the World certainly does need work. This thought serves – to quote one of the excellent stories I read – as both a warning and an invitation. On the evidence of these examples of writing, young people, in spite of everything, have the resilience and the creativity needed to begin again.
‘Many of the stories I read go to dark, dystopian landscapes. There are post-apocalyptic piles of – to quote another story – “ashes and soot”, but almost always by the end there are, as another young writer suggested, the seeds of a new world.
‘Light is a place, Dylan Thomas said, and dark is the way. The light is, of course, imagination – so it was very cheering to meet people here who could imagine themselves as wolves, gargoyles, giants, refugees from war or the Great Hunger, or visitors to a broken wonderland.
‘So many sentences I read have stayed and will stay with me. When you judge a competition you nearly always say it was hard to choose but in the end one or two jumped out. In this case, so many jumped out: it was story whack-a-mole inside my head. So if you don’t find yourself among the winners, please, please continue to work on your story, and other stories. There are lots of diamonds here waiting to be prised from the rock.’
This year’s prize booklet will be available to buy in the Bookshop and online here.
