Announcing our Shortlist & Longlist: January 2024 Call for Submissions

June 18, 2024

Announcing our Shortlist & Longlist: January 2024 Call for Submissions

We are delighted to announce the shortlisted and longlisted proposals from our January-February 2024 call requesting novellas and essay collections for adults.

Congratulations to the shortlisted and longlisted authors, and thank you to all the writers who submitted. We were delighted to recognise many names in the 138 submissions we received and our shortlist of 7 offers a glimpse of the range of exciting proposals we received. You can find out more about each of the titles below.

Shortlisted Proposals

Bonnie Lander Johnson with Treasure

An experimental personal essay collection skilful melding renaissance history with an account of multiple miscarriages. Crisp, reflective, beautiful.

X (twitter): @Bonnie_LJ

Craig Barr-Green with Forever’s Gonna Start Tonight

With trademark charisma and warmth, Craig Barr-Green shines a light on a misunderstood corner of music’s Hall of Fame in this collection of essays on the power ballad.

Instagram: @whycraigwhy

Kathleen Meredith‘s translation of We Must Have Been Happy [Debimos ser felices] by Rafaela Lahore

A delicate, fragmented exploration of a mother’s chronic mental illness. Winner of Best Unpublished Novel by the Chilean Ministry of Culture in 2019 and expertly carried into English with Meredith’s translation.

X: @katmeredith_ | Instagram: @kat__meredith

Kris Johnson with Floriography

A fragmented narrative pursuing a contemporary military wife settling in a new home: with spare, careful prose Johnson weaves a fresh, mesmeric portrait of nature and our search for meaning.

X: @KrisErinJohnson

Kwan Ann Tan with This Waiter

A provocative choose-your-own adventure story; Kwan Ann Tan’s smart, sure-footed prose promises a compellingly original experience in this dystopian novella.

X: @KwanAnnTan | Instagram: @kwanann.tan

Nuril Basri with The Sewer Rat

A witty, confident and gripping novella follows a queer Indonesian working class writer navigating the Western literary world, while falling in love with a heterosexual French man.

X: @basrinuril | Instagram: @nurilbasri

Yana Ellis‘ translation of In my fathers’ home the earth smells like the heavens by Samira El-Maawi (originally published by Zytglogge Verlag, 2020)

Samira El-Maawi’s debut novel is a sensory, compelling and forcefully uncanny exploration of growing up in Switzerland contending with racism, from the perspective of a ten-year-old girl; a fresh narrative voice powerfully rendered in Ellis’ translation.

X: @YanaEllis