Internationally recognised art and literary critic, writer and cultural producer. Published in ELLE, Glamour, Esquire and Cosmopolitan; member of the Union of Writers.
On the last Friday of October, the audience for one of the festival’s quietest events climbed to the Level 5 Function Room of the Royal Festival Hall. The glass walls looked out over the river at night; inside there was purple light, rows of chairs, a lectern with the Southbank Centre’s name on it and a Creative Future banner behind. For two hours the winners of this year’s Creative Future Writers’ Award stepped up to it, one after another, and read.
How the evening works
The winners were announced on 15 September, so the evening had one purpose: to put the winners, some of them early in their writing lives, in front of an audience, and to launch the anthology that collects their work. It was hosted by the year’s judges – the poet Nancy Campbell, the novelist Courttia Newland and the journalist Kieran Yates – and streamed free online for those who could not be there.
Creative Future is a Brighton-based charity that runs a national writing competition and development programme for under-represented writers. This year’s theme was “Material”. More than 1,850 entries were narrowed to fifteen winners across creative non-fiction, fiction and poetry, with £25,000 in prizes, courses and development support. Judges from Curtis Brown Creative, Faber Academy and The Literary Consultancy joined the panel, and part of the prize is development support from those partners – a route into an industry that rarely opens its doors this widely.
The work
“Material” proved an elastic brief, and the titles alone show how far the winners stretched it. In creative non-fiction the Platinum award went to Maika Carrillo for Pagpag, with Rebecca Faithful’s Pompey Potholes & Sanatorium Chic: Directions Through Material Impermanence taking Gold. In fiction, Debbie Hudson won Platinum for How to Dig a Warren, Abhishek Parasrampuria Gold for The Evidence Room and Aisha Okorie Silver for Blackwashed. In poetry, Alison Tanik’s Achilles leaves me in Norwood Junction took Platinum, ahead of J.J. Carey’s only natural and Duranka Perera’s The Forgotten Practical Considerations of Being Bombed and Invaded by a Pseudo-Colonial Power.
Heard one after another, the readings did what an anthology on a shelf cannot: they gave each text a voice, an accent and a pace. Poems that would take a minute to read on the page held the room for longer; prose excerpts stopped mid-scene and left the listener wanting the rest. The theme made the evening feel less like a list of winners than a set of answers to a single question about what our lives are made of.
The room
What stayed with me was the format itself. A Creative Future reading is brief, and it is the opposite of a festival headline event. There is no interview and no moderator asking the writer to explain the work. Each reader had a few minutes, a lectern and a microphone, and then gave way to the next. The readers came up with their pages and their lanyards, read, and stepped down; the attention in the room never dropped between them. With a few minutes each, the readers had to hold the room with the text alone, and they did.
Maria Bregman at the Creative Future Writers’ Award Showcase
Two nights earlier, in the Purcell Room, four internationally published novelists had talked about translators who do the work and are left off the poster. On Friday, the stage belonged to writers whom the industry might not otherwise have noticed. Both evenings came back to the same question of who gets the credit.
Where to read the winners
The 2026 anthology, launched at the showcase, collects the winning pieces. Details of the next Writers’ Award, and how to enter, are published by Creative Future. The London Literature Festival returns in October 2027.
