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.]