Writers who went on from a prize

Kit de Waal won the Bridport Prize twice for flash fiction, with Romans 1 Verse 29, Sins of the Heart in 2014 and Crushing Big in 2015. Her first novel, My Name Is Leon, came out in 2016. It was shortlisted for the Costa Book Award and won the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year. It was later filmed for BBC One. The Trick to Time was longlisted for the Women’s Prize. She is now honorary patron of the Bridport Prize, which is a nice full circle, and she has said in public that prizes can change a writing life. The useful detail is the form. She did not win a novel prize and wake up published. She won short short pieces, twice, and the novel followed.

The Bridport Prize names Kate Atkinson among previous winners, alongside Kit de Waal. Atkinson’s first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, won the Whitbread Book of the Year in 1995. The Jackson Brodie novels, beginning with Case Histories, made her one of the few writers read happily in both the literary pages and on holiday. A short-story prize early on does not explain a career like that. It does show that the people who later fill prize shortlists were once sending work into open competitions, the same way everyone else does.

Deepa Anappara won the Bridport novel award in 2017 with Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line. The book was published in Britain and America in 2020, longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, and shortlisted for the JCB Prize. Novel awards of this kind are judged on an opening and a synopsis, or on a portion of the manuscript, with the full book requested later. The win is a signal to agents that someone serious has already read past chapter one.

Jo Browning Wroe did not have to win. She was shortlisted for the Bridport novel award in 2017. A Terrible Kindness was a lead title for Faber in early 2022, went straight onto the Sunday Times bestseller list, and she was named one of the Observer’s top ten debut novelists that year. If you only enter prizes in the hope of the cheque, you miss this part. A public shortlist is something you can put in a query letter. Agents notice lists. So do editors who were not even judging.

Fiona Williams won the novel award in 2021 with The House of Broken Bricks, begun while she was on the creative writing MA at Bath Spa. Faber published it in January 2024 as a lead debut. Megan Davis won the same award in 2018 with The Messenger, a Paris thriller later published by Bonnier in 2023, with a second novel, Bay of Thieves, the year after. Davis has written that agents called as soon as she was longlisted, so she never had to do the cold query round for that book. She has also said she nearly missed the deadline because her computer crashed. The romance of the prize and the chaos of the afternoon can sit in the same story.

Kim Sherwood won the Bath Novel Award in 2016 for Testament, judged by agent Susan Armstrong, and signed with her. The novel was published by Riverrun in 2018, longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize and shortlisted for the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award. A few years later Sherwood was commissioned to write the Double O trilogy of James Bond novels, starting with Double or Nothing. The Bath prize is aimed at unpublished, unagented writers, and the judges are agents. That is the design. The win is cash, and it is also a reader who can say yes to the book.

Kelleigh Greenberg-Jephcott won the Bridport novel award in 2015 with Swan Song. It was published in 2018, longlisted for the Women’s Prize, and won the Society of Authors’ McKitterick Prize. Polly Crosby was runner-up in the novel award in 2018 with The Illustrated Child, published in Britain and America in 2020, with more novels after. Sean Lusk took second prize in the Bridport short story in 2014, then a two-book deal; The Second Sight of Zachary Cloudesley came from Doubleday in 2022 and was longlisted for the Walter Scott Prize. Joanne Briggs was nearly 59 when she won the first Bridport memoir prize in 2022. The Scientist Who Wasn’t There was published by Bonnier’s Ithaka Press in 2025 and reviewed in The Times and the Telegraph.

Julie Ma spent years not even making longlists, then won the WHSmith Richard and Judy Search for a Bestseller. Happy Families was published, followed by Love Letters. On the screen side, Elise Brown won WeScreenplay’s Diverse Voices lab in 2020. One of the judges, an executive at UCP, asked to meet her afterwards. That meeting helped her get staffed. She has since written on Hulu’s Candy and Showtime’s Yellowjackets.

Outside Britain the pattern is the same. Jean-Baptiste Del Amo won the Prix du jeune écrivain in 2006 for the story Ne rien faire. Gallimard published his first novel, Une éducation libertine, in 2008, and it won the Goncourt du premier roman. Mélissa Da Costa self-published Tout le bleu du ciel, won the first-novel contest on monbestseller.com, and was then contacted by the publisher Carnets Nord. She became one of the big commercial novelists in France. The competition was not the whole career. It was the moment someone with a list said, read this.