A pretend princess, the heiress of a haunted hotel on the moon and a newly born vampire are among the characters readers will meet in the entries shortlisted for this year’s Future Worlds Prize.

The prize – being awarded for the fifth time in 2025 – aims to find new talent based in the UK writing in the SFF space, and is funded by author Ben Aaronovitch and actor Adjoa Andoh. 

The eight shortlisted works and writers are:

• All Storms a Labyrinth by Phoebe Yemi Ara
• Blood in the Water by Amber Houlders
• Dream Scion by Thomas Gough
• Earth S.O.S. by Harmony Knight
• Hantu by Kat Bador
• Pit by Ayanna Van Der Maten
• Silted Hearts by Jade Cuttle
• The Princess of Small Things by C. M. Leung

The shortlisted entries can be read on the Future Worlds Prize website.

The winner of Future Worlds Prize receives £4,500, and the runner-up receives £2,500. The remaining six shortlisted writers each receive £850. 

All eight writers also get mentoring from one of the prize’s publishing partners: Bloomsbury, Daphne Press, Gollancz, HarperVoyager, Hodderscape, Orbit, Penguin Michael Joseph, Simon & Schuster, Titan and Tor.

This year’s winner and runner-up will be decided by a judging panel made up of:   

• 2023 Future Worlds Prize winner Mahmud El Sayed 
• Shadow and Bone actor Amita Suman 
• Bestselling author Saara El Arifi 
• Literary agent Amandeep Singh 
• Author Rogba Payne. 

The prize’s 2024 winner was Ese Erheriene with 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. The Suit Sellers of Kowloon is the first short story to win the prize.

A number of the prize’s winners and shortlisted writers have gone on to secure publishing deals:

• Inaugural winner Esmie Jikiemi-Pearson’s first novel The Principle of Moments, released in January 2024, was a Sunday Times bestseller. 
• 2023 runner-up Salma Ibrahim’s Salutation Road was released in February 2024 from Mantle

• M. H. Ayinde’s A Song of Legends Lost, which won the 2021 prize under its former title A Shadow in Chains, was published in April 2025 by Orbit
• 2024 shortlisted writer Marve Anson’s Firstborn of the Son, is out in October from Penguin Michael Joseph. 

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 Andoh, with additional support from its publishing partners. It is administered by Future Worlds Prize CIC, a not-for-profit organisation. 

For more on the prize, visit Futureworldsprize.co.uk, Twitter or Instagram.

Descriptions of the shortlisted works follow the jump.

Shortlist information

All Storms a Labyrinth by Phoebe Yemi Ara

Phoebe Yemi Ara is a WFTV Kay Mellor Emerging Writer (2024), London Library Emerging Writer (2021/22), Pan Macmillan Writer on The Rise (2024), and HarperCollins Author Alumna (2021) of screenplays and fiction. She is an award winning filmmaker; her films have been screened at BAFTA and BIFA qualifying festivals.

All Storms a Labyrinth is an adult/crossover fantasy rich with queer romance; This is How You Lose the Time War meets the lush world of Spirited Away and Arcane.

The Third House is responsible for protecting and guiding the timeline. Initiate Tarisai has sworn their life to serving the Third House, and the Owl, the time god that rules their House. Tarisai’s only desire is to hunt down the Wrath that slaughtered their village.

Until they witness a Priestess murder their god, and Tarisai is branded an enemy of their house. Now on the run, and transforming into a time daemon, they are forced to strike bargains with Wraths and gods alike in their quest to attain vengeance.

Blood in the Water by Amber Houlders

Amber Houlders is a narrative designer in the games industry, and has also written for theatre, film and graphic novels. She recently completed Curtis Brown’s Fantasy Writers Breakthrough course and enjoys writing women-focused fantasy stories (the more sapphic the better), set in second worlds that are aligned with and explore her family’s heritage. She is currently querying Blood in the Water, an adult, character driven, gothic fantasy. It includes POC representation, a dash of body horror, and terrible sapphic women. Influenced by West African & Caribbean mythology and culture, the novel explores generational trauma, the desire for freedom, and the politics of colonialism in a break-neck chase across the desert.

In Blood in the Water, Ifunanya is on the brink of her overdue retirement when her quartermaster asks her for one last favour: to find a missing scavenger ship and its crew.

Upon finding the ship stranded in the middle of the desert and occupied by Wata Mmụọ, sirené who haven’t been seen in hundreds of years, Ifunanya and her crew are attacked by Caliban, the empire’s newest Commodore. Taking advantage of the chaos, Ebieré, the leader of the Wata, enchants Ifunanya, forcing her to stage her kidnapping all so she can escape her impending marriage.

One daring escape later, the two find themselves on the run. Not only from Caliban, a man so desperate to prove himself that he’ll capture and kill any magic user in his path, but also Ebierè’s fiancé, Ọkụ. Who, upon finding out that she has been kidnapped, will go as far as making deals with long-dead gods to get Ebierè back.

Dream Scion by Thomas Gough

Thomas Gough is a budding writer based in London. He grew up in the suburbs of Manchester with a Jamaican mother and an English father. The folklore and myths of Africa and the Caribbean, along with his father’s love of fiction and horror, were just two of the many ways his parents inspired him. At university, his studies in modern languages and cultures sparked a desire to travel and tell stories of his own. After two years gallivanting around Shanghai, Tommy returned to the UK and earned a master’s degree in Chinese Studies from the University of Oxford. Since then, he’s been working in investigations and intelligence – convincing friends and family that he’s a desk-bound super spy.

Dream Scion takes place in Gaminia, a once-great nation now in economic decline and fading from its former glory. The story follows three high-born siblings – Elfine, Savas, and Aurelia. Elfine, bold and restless, abandons court life to become a justiciar, only to uncover an ancient plot that threatens the future of Gaminia. Savas, the disgraced middle child with too many vices and no regrets, finds unexpected purpose when a rebel movement offers him a cause worth fighting for. And then there’s Aurelia – the youngest, who is quietly unravelling as she tries to figure out what her dreams mean and a way to stop the nightmares. As strange disappearances spread along the borders and a mysterious delegation arrives from the north, the line between reality and myth begins to blur. In this age, wisdom seems to come only from the whispers of the dead. Soon, each sibling must decide where their loyalties truly lie.

Earth S.O.S. by Harmony Knight

Throughout a youth lived between the concrete jungles of South London and a small town in rural Essex, Harmony Knight found freedom of expression in writing. After graduating with a 1st Class Honours, she has sought to travel the world, discovering the joy of existence by opening her heart to the beautiful myriad of human culture, which is reflected deeply in her writing. Harmony has published several articles with outlets such as Gifted, By Nature and Black Ballad, with said work reaching acclaim in Black Ballad Best of 2021. Harmony has also worked in film, television, music, editing, journalism, and photography.

In Earth S.O.S., at the dusk of the 21st century, a super quantum arms race saw the end of civilization on Earth as we know it. Those created to serve human-kind were freed from their subservient programming, their wrath almost eradicating Earth of all living organisms.

Hidden beneath The Colossus, New London is one of the last outposts of Old Earth and home to a quagmire of renegades; Hiro, a disgraced Martian Prince, Abyss, a junkie without a cause, John, Earth’s golden boy, and Alber, an elite killing machine.

But under the corrupt boot of an anonymous hierarchy with an omnipresent eye, and the mayhem of frenetic interplanetary wars, the odds are hideously stacked against them all.

Hantu by Kat Bador

Kat Bador is a British and Malaysian writer who loves any genre and any medium that she can get her hands on. Currently, she is finishing up her final year studying Politics, Philosophy and Economics in Manchester, but she spends most of her time writing fantasy instead of her dissertation. Between 2021 and 2022, she hosted a writing podcast for The Young Writer’s Initiative where she interviewed authors and other writing professionals. In 2023, she published a short story in Nighthawk Literature magazine. In her spare time, she likes doing improv, poetry nights and playing her kazoo (badly).

Hantu revolves around a haunted hotel on the moon. It incorporates gothic elements and mixes them with Malay folklore. Melati, a young heiress, arrives at the hotel that she has inherited from her late estranged mother. Strange characters lurk in the hotel, including a tiger stalking the halls, ghostly employees, and a manager that never ages. The book intertwines her journey with the stories of those that have come to stay in the hotel, and those that cannot leave. All the while, Melati wrestles with a complex relationship with her mother who may be dead . . . but not gone.

Pit by Ayanna Van Der Maten

Ayanna Van Der Maten has been writing fiction since she was 13 years old. She works as a teaching assistant at a primary school in east London, and as a steel pan gig musician with Nostalgia Steel Band and the Entertainers Steel Band. She has a master’s degree in critical theory from King’s College London. She started writing Pit while working as a bartender at Dalston Superstore, where she and her colleagues fought for union recognition to better their working conditions. She served as the union representative for bartenders for one year in 2022, where she most notably negotiated for and won a 10% staff pay rise, staff toilet facilities, and paid cabs home for staff working past midnight. She was shortlisted for the #Merky Books New Writers’ Prize 2023/24 with an extract from Pit.

In Pit, Amara lacks career prospects. She works at a club in east London where she is unsympathetic to the patrons. She has an altercation with a vampire in the club’s back alley one night while on shift, blacking out only to re-awaken three nights later, buried alive in a shallow grave in Walthamstow Cemetery. The only thing she can do is dig herself out of her hole and go back to work, now a frenzied, homicidal vampire. Just when it seems her prolonged, stunted life couldn’t get any worse, she is tracked down by the vampire that did it to her. A 16th Century Dutchman by the name of Jan van Wees, and an ancestor of hers by the most dubious, transatlantic means. Reluctantly, Amara joins Jan’s family of strange, unsocialised vampires, where she takes up the role of ‘daughter’ until she can forge a way out of Jan’s grasp.

Silted Hearts by Jade Cuttle

Jade Cuttle is an academic and journalist, writing for the Guardian and the Observer following her arts commissioning editor role at the Times. As a BBC New Generation Thinker, she’s written and presented Radio 3’s Digging for Words and features across the BBC. While her fiction conveys her muddy passion for historical reenacting, being one of Britain’s first mixed-black female warriors trained in sword, spear and axe combat, her non-fiction explores soil-self connections and “thinking brownly”. Both books-in-progress reflect her AHRC-funded PhD on black nature poetry, supervised by Robert Macfarlane at Cambridge, with a “mossary” of coinings. She’s an award-winning poet and singer-songwriter of Algal Bloom.

Silted Hearts is set in AD 879. A mother is drowned for sorcery, her blackness seen as a curse. Her daughter Ingrid flees into fenland where spirits whisper survival and silted kinship sprouts. When her solitude is shattered by Eirik, this wounded outlaw king becomes a welcome companion through savage wildlands. But hailing from the army that ravaged her mother’s sun-soaked coast, can this twisted love story end in anything other than flames? Silted Hearts reimagines the forgotten Viking raids across Africa through the magic of romantic-fantasy, witchcraft and enchanting connections to brown earth. What was it like to be dark in the dark ages? Where did the enslaved find light?

The Princess of Small Things by C. M. Leung

Cassie Leung is a British-Chinese writer who grew up in London to parents from Hong Kong. She primarily writes queer SFF and has previously been shortlisted for the Mo Siewcharran Prize 2024. Most of her time not writing is spent scouring theatres for deals, watching sports anime and buying too many books. Sometimes she even reads them.

In The Princess of Small Things, Ziyu is accompanying her closest friend, Princess Minyu, to her political marriage with Prince Asander. When Minyu suddenly dies on the long sea voyage, Ziyu takes the princess’s place to preserve the fraught alliance between their countries. On their arrival, she discovers that her husband-to-be has also perished, in suspiciously similar magic circumstances to Minyu. Ziyu must navigate a foreign court, uncover the assassins, and negotiate new treaty terms – which includes marrying Asander’s reluctant brother, Mathias – all without revealing she isn’t the real Princess Minyu.

[Based on a press release.]