Future Worlds Prize for Science Fiction And Fantasy Writers Of Colour announced its 2024 shortlist today, which this year takes readers from a world powered by energy gained from the act of mapping territories to the streets of Hong Kong where a suit maker finds success with a mysterious new fabric.

The eight shortlisted stories (in alphabetical order by author surname) are:

• The Unbound Atlas by Zita Abila
• Blood on Shadowed Blades by Nelita Aromona
• The Suit Sellers of Kowloon by Ese Erheriene
• Ek Haseena Thi by Isha Karki
• The Yawn of the Pond by Inigo Laguda
• Walk in Fire by Ruairidh MacLean
• Tribe of the Snow Leopards by Farah Maria Rahman
• Let None Through by M.A. Seneviratne

This year’s prize will be judged by:

• 2021 Future Worlds Prize winner M.H. Ayinde
• writer and novelist author Isabelle Dupuy
• quantum physicist turned best-selling author Femi Fadugba
• founder of Originate Literary Agency, Natalie Jerome
• Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning author Tade Thompson.

Future Worlds Prize for Fantasy and Science Fiction Writers of Colour aims to find new talent based in the UK writing in the SFF space, from magical realism and space operas to dystopia and more. The winner will receive a prize of £4,500, the runner-up £2,500 and the remaining six shortlisted authors will each receive £850. 

All shortlisted writers, the runner-up and the winner will also receive mentoring from one of the prize’s publishing partners. The winner of the Future Worlds Prize 2024 will be announced at an event in May.

The prize’s publishing partners are Bloomsbury Publishing, Daphne Press, Orion Books’ Gollancz, Penguin Random House’s Michael Joseph, Hachette’s SFF imprint Orbit, Hodder’s Hodderscape, and Pan Macmillan’s Tor.

Future Worlds Prize was founded by bestselling author Ben Aaronovitch in 2020, and was previously named the Gollancz and Rivers of London BAME SFF Award. The prize is financially supported by Aaronovitch and Bridgerton actor Adjoa Andoh. It is administered by Future Worlds Prize CIC, a not-for-profit organisation. 

The 2023 winner was Mahmud El Sayed for his novel What the Crew Wants. M.H. Ayinde won in 2021; A Song of Legends Lost, the first book in her trilogy, is due out in 2024. The inaugural prize was won by Esmie Jikiemi-Pearson for The Principle of Moments, which was released in 2023 and is a Sunday Times bestseller.

About the shortlisted authors and their work

Zita Abila

Zita is a Nigerian-British writer and artist. She grew up in the Netherlands and across England, from Manchester to rural Lincolnshire, then at 17 she moved to London to study Law at King’s College London. She has a MA in Literature and Culture from the University of Birmingham, where she developed a love of oral histories and lost languages, which often find their way into her stories. In 2023, she graduated from the HarperCollins Author Academy, and was shortlisted for the FAB Prize and Golden Egg Award. Her artwork has been exhibited at Somerset House as part of the London Design Festival, and at the Victoria Miro Gallery in 2022.

Blurb for The Unbound Atlas

The Unbound Atlas is a cross-over romantic fantasy where Babel meets Daughter of Smoke and Bone. In a world powered by energy gained from the act of mapping territories, 23-year-old Yagazie is employed as an artist in the Fantasy Maps department of the Royal Academy of Mapmaking in London, and spends her days keeping her head down to not draw attention to her underlying ability to map souls. But when the wrong person learns she is a soul-mapper, she is kidnapped by a soulless young man, we’ll call him X, and drawn into a journey mapping souls around the world, collecting long-buried secrets which could upend the map-based economy.

Nelita Aromona

Growing up in the concrete jungle of inner-city London, Nelita Aromona escaped into reading and writing to experience many different lives from the moment she could hold a book for herself. Now that she’s a little older, she’s a project manager in construction who always finds the time to watch anime and k-drama, and learn Japanese. Blood on Shadowed Blades is the tip of the iceberg of all the black stories she wants to tell, with the hope that every character makes a reader feel something

Blurb for Blood on Shadowed Blades

Assassin. Aliriko. K. — Amidst the war against his nightmares and the investigation into the missing women, orders from above send K on a mission to kidnap the princess of a neighbouring kingdom with his killing instinct leashed, or suffer the fate that his ancestors faced long ago.

Princess. Tegu. Zeria. — With her hand forced to expedite her plans to sit on another throne, Zeria’s request for aid lands her in the care of a man who shouldn’t exist, and leads her to confront the consequences spawned from royal rule.

But the assignment that brings them together is only the beginning of uncovering secrets of generations past, and healing the wound that makes Syneria bleed.

Ese Erheriene

Ese Erheriene is an emerging writer of short stories, fiction and poetry. Born and raised in South East London, she has lived in France, Norway, and across Asia. A journalist, she wrote for The Wall Street Journal — in London and Hong Kong — for almost six years. In 2020, she moved to Portugal for a year to write about identity, [dis]connection and culture. This became her short story ‘The Knowledge’, published in the Goldfish Anthology (2023). Her fiction was longlisted for the Deborah Rogers Fund Award in 2023 and her poetry was commissioned for the Montcalm Hotel Marble Arch as part of its relaunch.

Blurb for The Suit Sellers of Kowloon

A short story set among the men who work as suit sellers and tailors on the streets of Kowloon, in Hong Kong. We follow Siddharth as, one by one, sellers begin to go missing under mysterious circumstances — but the thread running through it all is the love story between Siddharth and his wife: Onovughakpor. This is a brief meditation on what we do to survive, on the idea that people contain multiples and on how life rarely progresses in a straight line.

Isha Karki

Isha Karki is a writer and PhD student based in London, currently thinking through the complexities of representing sexual violence, trauma, and testimonies on the page. Her short fiction has won the Dinesh Allirajah Prize, Galley Beggar Press Short Story Prize and Mslexia Short Story Competition. Her work has appeared in publications such as khōréō, Lightspeed, and Nightmare Magazine, and she is an alum of Clarion West.

Blurb for Ek Haseena Thi

In Ek Haseena Thi, a film student travels to an isolated haveli in the borderlands of India. Thirty years ago, the haveli was the set for a much-hyped Bollywood horror film which was never released after its leading heroine vanished without a trace. Drawing on myth and the gothic, Ek Haseena Thi reclaims monstrosity and sisterhood, interrogating the extractive violence wreaked by wealth and privilege. Ek Haseena Thi is part of Good Girls, a genre-crossing collection of short stories which experiment with folklore, body horror, dystopia and the surreal to explore rape culture, violence, and trauma through the lens of brown womanhood.

Inigo Laguda

Inigo Laguda is a Yoruba-British writer, poet and musician from Hertfordshire. His soundscapes have appeared in The Serpentine Gallery, Venice Biennale and 180 The Strand. His poetry has won awards by The Young Poet’s Society. His nonfiction has appeared in Black Youth Project, Netflix and The Metro. His short stories have been long-listed for The Commonwealth Short Story Prize and received a special commendation for The Guardian & 4th Estate 2021 Prize. He was long-listed for the 2023 Bloomsbury Mentorship Programme and is an alumnus of the 2022/2023 London Library Emerging Writers Programme.

Blurb for The Yawn of the Pond

The Yawn of the Pond follows a nameless poacher-hunter with a supernatural ability to conspire with nature as he attempts to fulfil a promise. Tasked with finding the granddaughter of Baruti – his mentor, closest friend and Khoisan elder – the journey takes him across the Central Kalahari Game Reserve of Botswana. After crossing paths with a safari guide from the Makgadikgadi Pans, the guide and the poacher-hunter come face to face with ancient powers.

Ruairidh MacLean

Ruairidh MacLean is the son of a Dominican and a Scot; small island people who survived Catholicism and Calvinism and a bad party in South London to find each other. Until 2022 he was an English teacher in a London FE college where he taught students to love, endure and conspire against the English language. Last year he left that work to dedicate himself to his first vocation; writing stories about alien magicians and humane machines.

Blurb for Walk in Fire

The Quiet Land is a strange country, a fragment written out of history by those fleeing a world determined to destroy itself. But a peace apart cannot last and the horrors of the outside world are not as distant as its architects believe. Tales comprises ten fantastical stories; a tower grows eternally; friends become predator and prey; refugees flee a never-ending war. These apparently independent fables weave together the fate of the Quiet Land, illuminating the threads that connect its curious lives and draw them blindly towards catastrophe. 

Walk in Fire is the third such episode, the story of an alien attraction across a portal of fire; of thought and flesh united by flame.

Farah Maria Rahman

Farah Maria Rahman lives in London and studied English at the University of Sussex and Goldsmiths College. She has been published in Litro magazine, 365 Tomorrows, Tales of the DeCongested Vol 1 (Apis Press), Brittle Star, Shot Glass journal, New Humanist, Tribune, Huffington Post and Crossing the Dissour. She has been an artist in residence at The Guesthouse Project in Cork city, and her story The Alder Tree was performed at the Whose Woods These Are: A festival of trees at the Dock Arts Centre in Carrick-on-Shannon. She was selected for the Royal Literary Fund Writers’ Pool bursary in 2006. 

Blurb for Tribe of the Snow Leopards

On Aurotopia, a planet much like Earth, Tahmina is growing restless. The rules of her village are constantly revised by the all-powerful ‘elders’, and following orders is not what she’s best at. When her closest friend goes missing, Tahmina must go against all that she knows to find her. But what she discovers goes beyond anything she could have imagined… her home is being colonised by the Earth-born, and her ‘best friend’ is on their side.

M.A. Seneviratne

M.A. Seneviratne is a tea-hoarding Sri Lankan auntie and writer of speculative fiction. An alumnus of the University of Cambridge where she obtained her LLM and the inability to ride a bicycle, she is now pursuing a PhD in Socio-Legal Studies. When she isn’t researching or writing, she likes to procrastinate and avoid writing about herself in the third person. You can find her short fiction at Tasavvur or her handful of terribly composed tweets at @Bookish_Auntea.

Blurb for Let None Through

Ceylon, 1925. At a holder university built for maintaining peaceful relationships between Ceylon’s native species, a pair of mysterious professors recruit a group of students: thought-consuming Vetala Reith Samarakoon, flesh-eating Pisahcha Laila Pinto and their inevitable human prey Cassius Ramachandran. Driven by their individual agendas, the trio join a secret society for reviving indigenous literature in exchange for guaranteed entry into Oxford and Cambridge. But when a body is found on campus and a suspicious nun launches a murder investigation, they soon learn the true price of an ‘English’ education.

[Based on a press release.]

The Future Worlds Prize for Fantasy and Science Fiction Writers of Colour announced its shortlist for the 2023 prize on May 5.

• Dawn in Arborellum by Ama Josephine Budge
• What the Crew Wants by Mahmud El Sayed
• The Archer and the Oracle by Anne Elicaño-Shields
• Light at Midnight by Ali Mahdi
• The Taste of a Planet by Arianne Maki
• Firstborn of the Sun by Marvellous Michael Anson
• The Breath of Silence by Melanie Reynard
• Wisteria Chumleigh by Calah Singleton

The prize will be judged by: Syima Aslam – founder of Bradford Literature Festival; Aliette de Bodard – author and winner of three Nebula Awards, an Ignyte Award, a Locus Award, a British Fantasy Award and five British Science Fiction Association Awards; Nikita Gill – poet and author of seven volumes of poetry and one novel in verse; and Esmie Jikiemi-Pearson – inaugural winner of Future Worlds Prize.

Future Worlds Prize for Fantasy and Science Fiction Writers of Colour aims to find new talent based in the UK writing in the SFF space, from magical realism and space operas to dystopia and more. The winner will receive a prize of £4,000, the runner-up £2,000 and the remaining six shortlisted authors will each receive £800. All shortlisted writers, the runner-up and the winner will also receive mentoring from one of the prize’s publishing partners. The winner of the Future Worlds Prize 2023 will be announced at an event at Hachette UK on Monday 22 May.

The prize’s publishing partners are Bloomsbury Publishing, Orion Books’ Gollancz, Little,Brown’s SFF imprint Orbit, Hodder’s Hodderscape, and Pan Macmillan’s Tor.

Future Worlds Prize was founded by bestselling author Ben Aaronovitch in 2020, and was previously named the Gollancz and Rivers of London BAME SFF Award. The prize is financially supported by Aaronovitch and Bridgerton actor Adjoa Andoh. It is administered by Future Worlds Prize CIC, a not-for-profit organisation.

Last year’s prize was won by M H Ayinde, who has since secured an agent for her novel A Shadow in Chains. The 2020 prize was won by Esmie Jikiemi-Pearson for The Principle of Moments. Jikiemi-Pearson has since secured a publishing deal with Gollancz, and her debut novel will be released in 2023.

About the shortlisted authors and work

Dawn in Arborellum by Ama Josephine Budge

Ama Josephine Budge is a Speculative Writer, Artist, Curator and Pleasure Activist whose praxis navigates intimate explorations of Blackness, aesthetics, ecology and feminism. Ama’s speculative fiction, art writing and essays have been commissioned and published internationally, and she is in the final stages of her PhD at Birkbeck University of London.

Blurb for Dawn in Arborellum

Dawn in Arborellum is an uncanny story of interspecies co-dependence, sensuality and isolation in the wake of climate colonialist catastrophe. Now existing in a new solar system, humans survey the worlds that surround them, determined not to repeat the destructive mistakes of their past. Arboreal specialist Thea, has been awarded a coveted twenty-five year residency on the green planet of Arborellum to study the enormous trees that inhabit it, her solitude broken only by the appearance of her designated Wellness Counsellor every three years. But this year, the cryptic yet compelling First Guardian Selen Ami arrives, seemingly more interested in her research than her wellbeing. It seems that everything is not as it should be on Earth, nor indeed on Arborellum.

What the Crew Wants by Mahmud El Sayed

After reading Frank Herbert’s Dune, aged 12, Mahmud spent his summer holidays in Egypt trying to summon a sandworm. When that didn’t work, he decided to become a writer. A British-Egyptian writer and translator based in London, he is keen on cats, libraries and anything science fiction.

Blurb for What the Crew Wants

The blackouts are getting worse. Two hundred years into its journey to establish a new home for humanity, power on the city-ship Safina is faltering. When the generation ship unexpectedly crashes out of warp, the crew face their biggest test yet. A race against time amid dwindling resources to get the ship back underway. Rising protests against a stagnant Administration. And, oh yeah, the colonists in the hold—the crew’s own ancestors—are beginning to wake up from cryo-stasis and are not best pleased to find themselves trapped on a ship that is slowly dying. What the Crew Wants is a retelling of the Arab Spring… in space! It is the story of how you are your language and how, sometimes, there is no choice but to take a stand.

The Archer and the Oracle by Anne Elicaño-Shields

Anne Elicaño-Shields, a Filipino author, writes YA and adult fiction. Previously based in Manila, Bangkok, and Washington DC, her writing is inspired by the myths, folklore, and urban legends of these places. Her awards include Creative Future Writers Award, FAB Prize, the London Writers Awards, and more. Anne lives in London with her husband and two children.

Blurb for The Archer and the Oracle

Sparks fly when a present day 17-year-old Filipino-British oracle swaps places with Eros, the teenage god of love. It’s all fun and first times, time travel, and madcap matchmaking — but can the two find happiness together when their deal inadvertently opens the door to shapeshifter hunting Eros to usher the disappearance of love from the world?

Light at Midnight by Ali Mahdi

Ali works as an auditor in the corporate world and is training as a transpersonal psychotherapist. His work explores dreams, sacred psychology, and what it means to be human in the age of machines.

Blurb for Light at Midnight

Nur has signed up for vocational college – his only chance at a real life as a re-naturalised, fully integrated citizen. Cut off from his family and put through visceral and dehumanising training environments – Gulag, the Ministry of Dreams and Dog Week – he tries to distinguish VR from dreams from reality, and to remember who he really is.

The Taste of a Planet by Arianne Maki

Arianne Maki is a mixed Japanese-Indonesian who grew up in Scotland and England. They have recently gained an MA in Ecology, Culture, and Society, where they pursued interests in critical animal and plant studies. Arianne hopes to further explore multispecies relations in writing, and to create weird, touchy-feely fiction that helps someone to feel a little more seen.

Blurb for The Taste of a Planet

On an extra-terrestrial Japanese colony in a near-distant future, the everyday lives of a cranky grandmother, an overworked journalist, and a wannabe celebrity are loaded with questions of agency. The city they inhabit is lush and humid—perfect for the supposedly unpickable, giant edamame-like “beans” that have mysteriously sprouted throughout the streets. More questions soon arise: what exactly are the beans? How do they entwine with the upcoming independence referendum? Why—on this Earth and the next—should anyone care about alien beans in the first place? In answering these, the grandmother, the journalist, and the wannabe must each confront their own innermost fears. The truth is often scary but, in the end, it is always delicious.

Firstborn of the Sun by Marvellous Michael Anson

Marvellous Michael Anson is devoted to giving her readers fast-paced, high-stakes stories that explore the multi-faceted human condition. She has been creating poems, short stories, theatre and film for over a decade. Marve has been shortlisted for awards such as the 2022 Jericho Writers Friday Night Live Competition and the 2022 Kit De Waal Bursary, and she hosts Facebook writing group Writers Connect.

Blurb for Firstborn of the Sun

Everyone in the kingdom of Oru is born with agbara—the ability to draw magic from the sun. Everyone that is, except Lọ́rẹ. When the gods call for her best friend’s life, the home she grew up in becomes the prison she must escape. The Holy Order sends their deadliest assassin after her, but she just might be her own worst enemy. She must choose who needs saving, her family, her kingdom or herself.

The Breath of Silence by Melanie Reynard

With a background in film & TV, Melanie Reynard now works in garden design and dabbles in the mystic arts of social media marketing for a landscaping company. Reading and writing fiction every spare minute she gets, she juggles life with two young children, volunteer work and a neurotic cat. Despite living in London & Surrey for over twenty years, her Lancashire accent persists.

Blurb for The Breath of Silence

Science and religion have suppressed magic in Arden, but not for much longer. Ordered to steal a cursed relic, Fry, a warrior with a fierce determination to prove herself must risk exposing her forbidden powers or fail her quest. Tailed by an immortal witch seeking the relic to unlock her power, Fry is faced with either accepting exile—or working with Kris, a rival smuggler. But Kris is a skilled liar, superstitious about magic, and has his own secrets and spiritual demons to fight. To stop the witch and return magic to the world, they’ll have to learn the hardest lesson of all: to trust each other.

Wisteria Chumleigh by Calah Singleton

Calah Singleton is an editor at an independent publishing house. Originally from the United States, she’s lived in London for nearly a decade. When not writing or reading, she fiddles with her band, paints, and wanders around in nature living out her cottage-core dreams.

Blurb for Wisteria Chumleigh

Wisteria Chumleigh: rebellious, cynical, a disappointing middle child and mediocre witch. Summoned back home to the magical enclave of Fayre Havering, she thinks it’ll give her time to figure out her life – but she becomes entangled in a series of murders that threaten the fragile peace of the village. Murders apparently linked to a decades-old cold case, one whose solution may be closer to home than Wisteria realises…

[Based on a press release.]

Future Worlds Prize for Fantasy and Science Fiction Writers of Colour 2021 judging panel members are:

• Actor and author Shobna Gulati
• Author Tasha Suri
• Writer Nii Ayikwei Parkes
• Journalist Zahra Hankir
• Cultural commentator Lloyd Bradley
• Publisher Valerie Brandes.

Sarah Shaffi, project manager for the prize, said: “This year’s judging panel is a dream group of hugely talented individuals who bring with them a wealth of knowledge about storytelling in its many different forms. It’s thrilling to have them all on board.

“I’m also excited that HarperVoyager and Del Rey UK are joining as partners for the prize, cementing how important this prize is to SFF in the UK.”

Future Worlds Prize for Fantasy and Science Fiction Writers of Colour, which closes for submissions at 23:59 p.m. GMT on Friday, June 25, aims to find new talent based in the UK writing in the SFF space. The winner will receive a prize of £4,000, the runner-up £2,000 and up to six additional shortlisted authors will each receive £800. All shortlisted writers, the runner-up and the winner will also receive mentoring from one of the prize’s publishing partners

Shobna Gulati, who has just finished filming the role of Ray in the upcoming feature film Everyone’s Talking About Jamie and is the author of the memoir Remember Me? Discovering My Mother As She Lost Her Memory, said: “I am absolutely thrilled to be a judge. I have always found a sense of belonging in fantasy and science fiction. To celebrate writers of colour working within this genre…what’s not to love?”

Tasha Suri, author of The Books of Ambha duology, said: “I’m delighted to be judging Future Worlds Prize. There are so many talented SFF writers in the UK who have been overlooked or haven’t had the opportunities they deserve, and this prize feels like a fantastic step towards changing the face of the SFF genre for the better.”

Nii Ayikwei Parkes, author of six books including two collections of poetry, said: “Having spent most of my writing life advocating for literature that reaches beyond the conventional, it’s a huge honour to be a judge for Future Worlds Prize for Fantasy and Science Fiction Writers of Colour. I think that SFF as a genre already owes so much to writers of colour globally, but we have not seen output in the UK particularly that reflects that. I am very happy to have a chance to contribute to righting that imbalance through this prize.”

Zahra Hankir, a Lebanese journalist who edited the Our Women on the Ground anthology, said: “I’m so excited to be part of this important judging panel and to help elevate and celebrate the work of writers of colour in this fascinating genre, at a time when the publishing industry is still lagging in diversity, despite some strides forward.”

Lloyd Bradley, one of the UK’s foremost Black music experts and a seasoned cultural commentator, said: “Years ago, I remember an African American comedian riffing on the just-released Logan’s Run film from the angle that there were no black people in it (the character Box was an evil robot), the punchline being ‘they’re fixing for us not to be around in the future’. I’ve long felt it’s been a bit like this with the writing of it too, so a competition for fantasy and sci-fi writers of colour is a doubly exciting prospect and I’m so looking forward to taking a trip to the worlds their imaginations will create. Future Worlds Prize is one of the most thrilling and necessary developments in British publishing and I feel privileged to be part of it.”

Valerie Brandes, founder of Jacaranda Books, said: “I am particularly excited to be part of the judging panel for this award because, besides the importance of fantasy and science fiction writing in continuing to reflect and create past, present and future worlds that de-centre eurocentric narratives, this prize is open to debut writers. Supporting new voices and relocating the canon to include them in all their brilliance is central to the work that I do and therefore I am looking forward to what we will uncover through the submission process.”

HarperVoyager, the SFF imprint at HarperCollins, and Penguin Random House UK’s Del Rey UK are partnering with the prize this year, alongside the already announced Gollancz, Hachette’s SFF imprints including Orbit, and Pan Macmillan’s Tor.

Future Worlds Prize, first run in 2020 and founded by bestselling author Ben Aaronovitch, was previously called the Gollancz and Rivers of London BAME SFF Award. As part of the prize’s long-term aim of opening science fiction and fantasy publishing to more people, it has been rebranded for its second year. The prize is sponsored by Aaronovitch, with additional financial support from Bridgerton actor Adjoa Andoh. It is administered by Cityread, a registered literature charity.

The 2020 prize was won by Esmie Jikiemi-Pearson for The Principle of Moments, a space-based adventure story. Jikiemi-Pearson has since secured a publishing deal with Gollancz, and her debut novel will be released in 2022.

Future Worlds Prize for Fantasy and Science Fiction Writers of Colour closes for submissions at 23:59 GMT on Friday, June 25 2021.

For submission details and more on the prize, visit http://www.futureworldsprize.co.uk/, https://twitter.com/FutureWorldsPrz, or https://www.instagram.com/futureworldsprize/.

[Based on a press release.]