Tom Newlands, Literary Fiction Judge for the 2026 London Writers Awards and author of Only Here, Only Now, gives us insight into his writing process and provides advice for applicants of this year’s London Writers Awards. Applications for the awards close at 5pm on Thursday 30 October 2025. For more information head to the London Writers Awards page.
Who or what keeps you writing?
My imagination. I have ADHD, and I am lucky – it has given me a relentless creative engine. I have too many ideas, and it is often a struggle to record and organise them.
What are some of your writing do’s?
My only writing “do” would be to find what works for you! There is a lot of advice out there, much of it passed down from wealthy, able-bodied white men who died a long time ago. The act of sitting down to write takes courage, and it takes even greater courage to do that while disregarding all the well-worn guidance that’s floating around – but that’s what you have to do. There’s only one way, and that’s your own.
And writing don’ts?
It’s obviously important to read as widely as you can, and to learn from the books you love, but don’t waste time trying to imitate other writers.
How does place and identity show up in your work?
It’s central. My stories always begin with a landscape, or a building; usually somewhere I know. I don’t think about characters until I know the place they come from, and how that landscape might have shaped them. Books just now are really overstuffed with wine bars, dog walks, people talking over coffee on anonymous streets. All that is fine, but I want my novels to be filled with people and places that are not usually found in literary fiction, and that are unforgettably vivid.
What advice would you give to emerging writers who feel their backgrounds or perspectives aren’t represented in mainstream publishing?
Being an underrepresented writer you will likely have faced barriers to having your work published, but it can be seen as a great opportunity too. Editors and agents – and above all, readers – are looking to be taken somewhere they’ve never been before, to encounter a life and a voice that is new to them. If your background hasn’t historically been seen on the bookshelves, then now is the time for you to put it there! In terms of attitudes within the publishing industry there is still a long way to go, but things are improving, and there are numerous organisations out there now that can help you towards publication.
What’s the most important thing you’ve learned about writing and being a writer?
Sitting down a lot is really physically demanding – seriously! Self care, including regular exercise, is so important for both the body and mind.
class="post-77517 post type-post status-publish format-standard has-post-thumbnail hentry category-blogs category-network-knowledge"5 Short Stories That Shaped Me by Gurnaik Johal
Gurnaik Johal is the author of the short story collection We Move and novel Saraswati. In this blog, he shares his top five short stories that have inspired his craft, in conjunction with his upcoming Short Story Round Table workshop – taking place at The Albany on Tuesday 14 October 2025.
1. Pet Milk, Stuart Dybek
This is the short story I’ve reread the most times. Each time I revisit it, a new detail stands out. It slips from present to past effortlessly, and in transporting the narrator back in time, really moves the reader.
2. Lu, Reshaping, Madeleine Thien
This is another amorphous story that reads differently each time I revisit it. Thien has a knack for description and characterisation – this is a great example of the short story as a character study.
3. Extra, Yiyun Li
This was the story that made me a lover of short stories. There’s such a depth of empathy for all characters here, and Granny Lin, the main character has stuck with me for years.
4. Recitatif, Toni Morrison
Morrison’s only short story is sometimes understood mainly by its central gimmick, that the reader never knows which race the two main characters are. But there’s much more than that experiment here – it feels more timely now as political division forces issues to become more black-and-white.
5. Rainbows, Joseph O’Neill
O’Neill is a great comic writer and, with a background in law, is fantastic when writing about moral dilemmas. The problem at the centre of this story cuts across class and race really well.
Images 1-3, 5: The New Yorker. Image 4: Chatto & Windus
Published: Thursday 9 October 2025.
Spread the Word is pleased to announce the three writers commissioned to create new work as part of our 30th Anniversary LGBTQI+ writer commissions project.
Aislinn Evans, Conan Tan and Finn Brown have been selected by judges Remi Graves and Liam Konemann to develop a short, original piece of work across fiction, creative non-fiction and poetry.
Judge Liam Konemann said: “I was honoured to be a judge for Spread the Word’s 30th Anniversary LGBTQIA+ Emerging Writer commissions. At a time when the very concept of celebrating diversity is under attack, and against a cost of living crisis that further disenfranchises marginalised artists, the value of these paid commissions is immense. The quality of the works we received was very high, and I am greatly looking forward to seeing the finished pieces from our three talented commissioned writers.”
The commissions aim to showcase original work by London-based LGBTQI+ writers and provide a developmental and profile-raising opportunity.
Judge Remi Graves said: “It was so great to be a judge for these commissions, and we had a tricky time with shortlisting, which is testament to the quality of work we received! What a privilege to be involved in a project that values, remunerates and supports the work of all kinds of queer writers. These are trying times, but projects like this offer a little light for us all.”
The commission development period will run until January 2026.
About the writers
Aislinn Evans started in poetry, had a love affair with comics, a rather dramatic divorce with both, and now is something of an essayist. Her work concerns intimate and personal explorations of the built environment, a queer phenomenology of place, class struggle, and the failure of memory. Her practise can be defined as somewhat restless, formally ambiguous, and a tad confrontational. She makes videos and stuff too.
On the LGBTQI+ Emerging Writer Commissions, Aislinn said: “It’s an honour to receive this commission, which will give me the time and space to build my writing practice into something deliberate, considered and integrated into a wider world of creative nonfiction.”
Conan Tan is a queer poet. He is the winner of the 2024 Martin Starkie Prize, Singapore’s 2022 National Poetry Competition, and a finalist in the 2024 Oxford Poetry Prize and the 2025 Frontier Poetry Hurt and Healing Prize. He has received support from various organizations including Sing Lit Station, Poetry Translation Centre UK, the Transylvania County Library Foundation, and the Barbican Centre as a 2025 Barbican Young Poet. His poems appear in Oxford Poetry, Cincinnati Review, Rattle, Passages North, Salt Hill, Verse Daily, and elsewhere.
Conan commented: “I’m really honoured to be selected for this commission. A large part of my writing centres on the intersectional politics of queerness and race, and how queerness itself, like water, is fluid yet intrinsic to my identity. I’m excited to receive professional support to expand on these ideas in my writing.”
Finn Brown’s writing lives in publications including Queer Life, Queer Love 2 (Muswell Press), The Raven Review, Booth Journal, Annie Journal, Meniscus Journal, The Bombay Review, The Bittersweet Review and Snowflake Magazine. Their writing has also been shortlisted for the Creative Future 2024 Writers’ Award and commended for the Moth Short Story Prize 2025. They are an editor, curator and designer at queer and trans-led press t’ART.
Finn said: “I feel incredibly honoured to have received a commission to write a short story from Spread the Word. This is such a brilliant opportunity not just to write, but to develop as a writer under mentorship. I can’t wait to make the most of every bit of it. Thank you for supporting queer writers and for offering us the space to grow.”
class="post-77426 post type-post status-publish format-standard has-post-thumbnail hentry category-london-writers-awards"2026 London Writers Awards Judge, Ashani Lewis’ Top 5 Most Influential Books
2026 London Writers Awards judge for Literary Fiction – Ashani Lewis, shares her top five books that have influenced her as a writer. This list is brimming with inspiration for writers applying to the award this year.
1. Speedboat, Renata Adler
Adler sweeps through a range of miniature stories in a single narrative with a journalistic conciseness that I immediately wanted to try my hand at. It’s almost shallow: we get a perfect paragraph’s worth on ‘a polo-playing Argentine existential psychiatrist’ or ‘the wife of the Italian mineral-water tycoon’ and then never hear from them again. Speedboat is a recent read – my sister gave it to me for Christmas – but it occupies the same space as a couple of other books that had inspired me much earlier, including Tama Janowitz’s Slaves of New York.
2. Selected Stories, Katherine Mansfield
I had the Oxford World’s Classics Selected Stories when I was a kid, which had this fantastic oil painting of a woman on the cover, with a kind of greenish face and red lipstick, whom I always assumed was Katherine Mansfield. I remember writing my first proper short story and trying to emulate the self-contained completeness of Mansfield’s short fiction. A Cup of Tea, to me, is the perfect short story.
3. Brotherless Night, V. V. Ganeshananthan
I’m half Sri Lankan Tamil, and grew up hearing account after account of the civil war. Unbelievably, I had never read a book set in post-colonial Sri Lanka until three years ago, when Shehan Karunatilaka’s The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida won the Booker Prize. The Seven Moons was revelatory, as was Charu Nivedita’s Zero Degree, (not set in Sri Lanka, but following the Indian Tamil experience), but Brotherless Night has its hand in my heart. It was an immeasurably intense reading experience. Ganeshananthan has a journalism background, and the book is forensically researched, but it’s also bluntly, lucidly emotional. Brotherless Night has helped me think about how to write about that part of my family’s history, which is something that I’ve been doing recently, both for my upcoming novel, Suckerfish, and for another novel in progress.
4. 2666, Roberto Bolaño.
This absolute monolith is a very particular reading experience. I carted it around with me for about a month before I was finished, and The Part About The Crimes is particularly heavy going, but it turns its readers into evangelists. I was converted to Bolaño and now I attempt to convert others. The novel is full of unanswered riddles, or riddles that seem to have been answered in some elusive, sub-surface way that might reveal themselves on a fifth or sixth read. It’s a very good writing lodestar for when I’m tempted to overexplain.
5. A Series of Unfortunate Events, Lemony Snicket
Genius series, postmodernist literature for kids. The author, Lemony Snicket, is a fictional self-insert, constantly evading his own execution while telling the story of the Baudelaire orphans, who are mixed up in the same schism-stricken secret society responsible for Snicket’s predicament. Snicket is brilliantly unpatronizing, prone to deliberately unwieldy digressions and cryptic asides. ASOUE gave me a taste for reference and metafiction that I’ve never lost. (Years later, reading Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveller and Borges’ Ficciones, I felt a thrill of recognition.)
class="post-77414 post type-post status-publish format-standard has-post-thumbnail hentry category-news"Pam Williams’s ‘A Trace of Sun’ longlisted for Women’s Prize for Fiction 2024
class="post-77409 post type-post status-publish format-standard has-post-thumbnail hentry category-news"Mayo Agard-Olubo’s new book ‘Kid Rex To The Rescue’ published by Hodder Children’s book
Mayo Agard-Olubo is an alumnus of the 2022 London Writers Awards programme. He writes fantasy fiction for children of all ages from picture book through to young adult novels.
We are so proud to celebrate his debut picture book ‘Kid Rex To The Rescue.’
About ‘Kid Rex To The Rescue’:
Meet Max, an ordinary kid with extraordinary dino powers…
It may look like a messy bedroom that needs to be tidied, but for Max it’s…a new mission for KID REX!
Cape? Check
Dino mask? Check
Dino-rang and awesome gadgets? Check
As Max’s imagination transforms him into undefeated superhero Kid Rex, he’s ready to use his dinosaur powers to battle past a giant sea dragon, rolling robots and even a dust bunny army! Can Kid Rex – and his sidekick Dino Dad – defeat the evil King Dust Bunny and return the residents of Toy Town safely to their homes?
A celebration of the imagination, Kid Rex brings adventure and magic to the mundane, making everyday tasks exciting and fun.