Tice Cin took part in Spread the Word’s flagship writer development programme, the London Writers Awards, in its launch year of 2018.
We’re thrilled to learn that Safe Spaces, her new book about electronic music, love and grief, has been won in a four-way auction by Granta Books. The novel will be published in September 2026.
Tice Cin is a poet and writer from Tottenham, North London. Her debut novel Keeping the House was shortlisted for the Desmond Elliot Prize, the Jhalak Prize and the British Book Award Book of the Year Prize in 2022. Keeping the House also won a Society of Authors Somerset Maugham Prize and was named one of the Guardian’s Best Books of 2021 and in 2024. On our writer development programme, Tice said: “The London Writers Awards has been life-changing. I mean that with all my heart. Before this programme, I felt as though a book was a far too ambitious, far too big thing. Now, I feel this sense of confidence that feels quite different to what I felt before.”
Bella Lacey, managing director and publishing director at Granta Books, commented: “We are incredibly excited to welcome Tice Cin to Granta. Safe Spaces is an exhilarating outpouring of creativity, infused with the rhythms and musicality of London’s club scenes and deeply interrogating female desire, trauma, grief and community as a young woman seeks to find her way in the world.”
On Safe Spaces, Tice commented: “Inhabiting the world of this narrator trying to relate to the spaces around them, through ends and stop-starts, felt a transformative and eye-opening experience for me as a writer. Finding a home with Granta feels like an exciting chapter in my writing life, an independent press where my creative practice can continue to grow. ”
Huge congratulations Tice!
Read all about it in the Bookseller.
The London Writers Awards are supported through a philanthropic donation by Sam and Rosie Berwick.
Published: Wednesday 1 October 2025
Image credit: Aydin Barberini.