EXETER NOVEL PRIZE 2025

Our winner is Uduak-Abasi Ekong for Welcome Back, darling. Congratulations!

Huge congratulations to these authors, and thanks and recognition to every entry intot he 2025 prize. Shortlist and winner chosen by Hellie Ogden agent at WME - so grateful to her for her time and expertise.

SHORTLIST 2025

Conditional - Nisha Gopal 

Eyrie - Sophie Pawson 

Hour of the Dog - Elisabeth Gunawan

New Work - Martha Hipley

Nora - Eman Al Nafjan

Welcome Back, Darling - Uduak-Abasi Ekong 

SHORTLISTED AUTHOR BIOGRAPHIES

Uduak-Abasi Ekong is a Manchester-based Nigerian writer. Her fiction has appeared in The Bournemouth Journal, Ojuju Magazine, Wensum Literary, Everscribe Magazine, Brittle Paper, and Ekondo Review. She was runner-up for the inaugural Hilary Mantel Prize for Fiction and a winner of the 2025 Book Edit New Writers’ Prize. Her work has also been shortlisted or longlisted for the Women’s Prize’s Discoveries, Bath Novel Awards, Exeter Novel Prize, Merky New Writers’ Prize, and Creative Future Writers’ Award. She is a 2026 SmokeLong Emerging Writer Fellow and a Faber Academy alumna.

Her shortlisted novel, Welcome Back, Darling is a psychological horror about a woman whose dead husband reappears in the local market. It explores how grief can distort love into possession, and asks: What if the person who loved you most refused to let you go even in death?

Eman Al Nafjan is a Saudi writer and academic whose work explores the intersection of gender, culture, and social change in Saudi Arabia. She began writing publicly in 2008 through her blog, saudiwoman.me, where she documented everyday life and the evolving realities of women navigating a rapidly shifting society. Her writing combines personal observation with social and political analysis, focusing on how broader structural changes are experienced at the level of the family and the individual.
Her essays and commentary have appeared in international publications including The New York Times, The Guardian, Foreign Policy, and Politico. Her work has been recognised globally; she is a recipient of the PEN America Barbey Freedom to Write Award and the Reporters Without Borders Prize for Courage. She was named one of Time magazine’s 25 Most Influential People on the Internet in 2018, and was included in Foreign Policy’s Global Thinkers list in 2011. Her work is particularly concerned with how private lives are shaped by public norms and unspoken systems of control.

Nora is her debut novel.

Set in Riyadh in the early 2010s, Nora follows Reema, a seventeen-year-old girl growing up in the shadow of her older sister’s disappearance, a subject her family refuses to discuss. As Reema reaches the same age her sister was when she vanished, she begins quietly testing the boundaries around her life, trying to confirm what she has long suspected. What she uncovers is not a mystery in the usual sense, but a truth her family has chosen to live with, and that she must now decide whether she can live with too.

Elisabeth (Betty) Gunawanis an award-winning Chinese-Indonesian writer and performer whose work foregrounds the experiences of East and Southeast Asian communities. Her work has been featured and acclaimed by The Guardian, The Stage, Morning Star, The Skinny, The List and more.

As a writer-performer, her theatrical works have been presented at the Barbican, Soho Theatre, Summerhall and multiple times at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, garnering widespread recognition including The Stage Debut Award 2022. Her writings on theatre and performance have been published on The Stage and People of Theatre. Her stage works include Unforgettable Girl, Stampin' in the Graveyard and Prayers for a Hungry Ghost, which sold out ~800 seats at the Barbican three weeks out from opening. 

Hour of the Dog is her debut novel. She is currently working on a second novel set in the same world, following Myōkō’s daughters and granddaughters.

Sophie Pawson is a brand strategy specialist based in Bedfordshire, with her partner, Jack, and their Machiavellian cat, Delilah. She studied literature and linguistics at University of Kent, followed by a MSc in marketing at Lancaster University.

Since then, words have remained her biggest passion as a writer, reader, etymologist and aspiring polyglot. She also holds the unique “achievement” shared only with Romesh Ranganathan of misdeclaring a 9-letter word on Countdown as an 8, a memory that still sends shivers down her spine… Despite regularly writing stories as a child, Sophie didn’t come back to creative writing until last year, when it quickly became a huge source of excitement and escapism.

Her debut novel-in-progress, Eyrie, is a dual-POV psychological thriller set in London that centres around an atypical missing person’s case and the fallout that ensues. The novel explores themes of heredity, duality and how we process the pain we’ve suffered and the pain we’ve inflicted. It was inspired by the claustrophobic writing style present in ‘Rebecca’ and ‘The Secret History’, as well as the nuances of human connection and disconnection.

Her dream would be to see her book published in a second language… ideally one she’s learning!

Martha Hipley is a writer and filmmaker from Baltimore, Maryland, who splits her time between Mexico City, New York, and Berlin. Her fiction has been published in Maudlin House, VOLUME 0, and The Muleskinner Journal, among others. She is drawn to the little violences of daily life and the relationship between art and money.

Her play Night Market will debut this October in the WordOut theater festival in New York.

She is also seeking representation for her debut novel, New Work. The darkly comic thriller follows Anna, an embittered artist cornered by debt, who unlocks her creative potential and finds fame through violence as the nearby Occupy Wall Street protests challenge the excesses of the New York scene. 

 Nisha Gopal studied English Literature at university and was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize Discoveries (under her real name!). In her writing she enjoys exploring the complexities of female relationships and how crime intersects and pervades ordinary lives.  

Outside of writing, Nisha loves obsessively listening to one true-crime podcast, tackling her toppling TBR list, and taking language classes.

Her novel, Conditional is a dual-timeline novel about the complex untangling of nature and nurture, of what we can control, and what we never could. It follows Raveena over the years, starting on the day in 1977 when a violent crime against her family changes her world forever. Meanwhile in 2016, her daughter Neela deals with the unsavoury consequences of coming out to her mother. Seeking escape, she heads to the heat and freedom of Berlin, where hedonism and lust are waiting in abundance. But time is slipping away and she can’t run from her life forever…

LONGLIST 2025

Aftermath

Anechoica

A Short Visit

As the Tree Falls

Black Hope

Caving for the Lost and Found

Conditional

Devil Ridge Elegy

Echoes of Something Great

Eyrie

False Knight on the Road

Hour of the Dog

New work

Nora

North East District News

Shadowlands

Swimming in the Rain

The Archipelago

The Contagious Zest of Frankie Abignale

The Exhumation

The First Mary Stewart Girl

The Levelling

The New Kate Carter

The Witness from Salamanca

Welcome Back, Darling

Withdrawal

Congratulations to all the writers on the list for getting to this stage - a wonderful selection of genres and styles.  

See you at our hybrid celebration event on May 14th in Exeter. 

We had a record number of entries this year and the standard was very high with such a great range of writing. It was inspiring to see the amount of creativity and dedication.

Information about the Exeter Novel Prize

the 2026 prize will open for entries at the end of August

This prestigious prize welcomes entries in English from all over the world, and is open to all authors who are without representation by a literary agent at the closing date, whether or not they have previously been published. 

​​ Hellie Ogden, head of the book dept at WME Agency's London office, will choose the short list and winner for the competition.

First prize - £1000 
​Five finalists receive £100

By submitting the first 10,000 words of your novel, along with a synopsis, you are in with a chance of not only winning a prestigious prize, but also - by daring to put your work out there in the world - getting your name and work noticed.

What are you

waiting for?

Read the rules below carefully, then send us those first ten thousand words, plus a brief word synopsis, of a novel that has not been accepted for publication by a traditional publishing house. 

The fee for entry is £20, and for entry plus an appraisal report it is £150. PLEASE MAKE CLEAR IN YOUR EMAIL THAT YOU ARE REQUESTING A REPORT. Thank you!

Who won last year?

The 2024 Winner was - Last Castle Standing by Nida Broughton

other shortlisted novels were:
​A View of the Open Sky – Elisa Oh
​Bahadur is my Name – Loftus Brown
​The Alchemy of Light – Lenore Hart
​The King's Wife – Lauren Neely
The Revenge of Hepsibah Brown – Beth Webb​

For more information on the 2024 competition and previous winners over the years,

please visit creative writing matters

Exeter Novel Prize entry fee - £20

Entry fee including appraisal - £150

Why get an appraisal?

For an extra fee, you will receive a detailed appraisal of your submission. Your report will be written by an experienced writer/reader (no A.I. here!) offering you clear feedback and actionable suggestions.

These reports have proved very popular in the past: here are some of the responses from previous years:

• Thank you so much for this report, incredibly motivating, helpful and insightful, I’m already actioning the suggestions - Laura Bellingham

• Many thanks to your team and especially to Margaret James for her thoughtful—and very helpful—response to my entry. Among the several contests I’ve entered, and the several queries I’ve already sent out, I haven’t yet received a response as thorough and intelligent as hers - Gregory Bayer

• Many thanks for your constructive feedback. This was my first children's novel, and I am so pleased to read what worked and how to improve it - Margaret Magee

  If you do choose a report, can you make that clear in your email when you enter the prize? That will help enormously with our administration.

How to Enter the 2025 Exeter Novel Prize

the competition runs between JULY 1st 2025 and January 1st 2026

The Rules

Please read all the rules before you proceed: we don't want to disqualify anyone!

1.    The 2025 Exeter Novel Prize is open for submissions from July 1st until 11.59pm onJanuary 1st 2026, which is without exception the closing date. Any entries received after this date will be disqualified and no refund of the entry fee will be made.

2.    The competition is open to everyone, living anywhere in the world, published, self-published or yet to be published, who is not represented by a literary agent. All those long-listed will be asked if they are still eligible to go forward.

3.  Entries should take the form of the opening of your novel (not a random selection of scenes) and must not exceed a total of ten thousand words, witha synopsis in addition of not more than five hundred words. Any entries received without a synopsis will be disqualified. Entries must be the author’s own work. The novel does not have to be complete. Self-published novels are acceptable.

4.   You may enter more than one novel, but each entry must be emailed separately and must be accompanied by a separate entry fee. 

5.   All genres including children’s of Middle Grade (9-12), Young Adult and New Adult are acceptable. 

6.   Your name should not appear anywhere on the attachment. The attachment should have the same name as the title of your novel as it appears in the subject line of your email (minus ENP - see How to Enter below). 

Only doc, docx, rtf and pdf files will be accepted. Any other formats will be disqualified. Please present your work in 12pt Times New Roman or Arial, 1.5 or double-spaced. ​

7.    Entries must be in English.

8.    Entrants must be over 18 years of age.

9.    Entry must be made electronically and the fee paid via the website. The prize monies will be awarded via Paypal. The receipt issued by squarespace/paypal on payment of the entry fee is your receipt of entry. All receipts are matched with submissions and if we receive one without the other we will contact you. See How to Enter below.

10. Literary agent, Hellie Ogden from WME Agency will be the final judge. Although the organisers hope the winning entrant will achieve publication, no guarantee of agent representation or publication can be given.

11.   The decision of the judges is final. No correspondence will be entered into. ​

 Ready To Enter?

• in the subject line of your email, type ENPfollowed by the title of your novel.

• in the body of the email type your name, contact details (postal address and mobile and/or landline number) and the title of your novel. If payment is made using a different name, it is essential you include that name in the email you send with the novel. Also, if you are requesting an appraisal report, state that in your email.

• attach your novel and synopsis (as one document) in one of the formats set out in Rule Your name and contact details must not appear anywhere on the attachment. Email to exeternovelprize@gmail.com

• Make your payment - basic entry is £20; to enter and receive an appraisal report (no A.I. involved!) go for the second option which includes the entry fee and costs £150. Click on the appropriate button, then go up to thecart icon back up at the top of this page and click there to make your payment. You can pay by card, paypal etc.