The British Library and Hay Festival have today revealed the shortlist for the 2026 Eccles Institute & Hay Festival Global Writer’s Award. Given annually to two writers in the early stages of a new book relating to the Americas, the £20,000 prize is now in its 15th year.
Six writers make up the 2026 shortlist: Mexican writer and translator Carmen Ávila; Jamaican-born British writer Jacqueline Crooks; British Jamaican academic and public historian Misha Ewen; Japanese-Chinese-British-American author Rowan Hisayo Buchanan; British novelist and screenwriter Maddie Mortimer and Colombian novelist and academic Vanessa Londoño.
The two winners will hold the Eccles Institute & Hay Festival Global Writer’s Award for one year from 1 January 2026. They will each receive £20,000, in four grants, as well as a residency at the British Library, the chance to appear at future Hay Festival editions with their published work, and the opportunity to work with the Eccles Institute to develop and facilitate activities and events related to their research at the British Library.
The award is judged by a panel comprising Hay Festival International Director, Cristina Fuentes La Roche; Head of the Eccles Institute for the Americas and Oceania at the British Library, Polly Russell, Director of WritersMosaic Colin Grant; and Deputy Head of the Eccles Institute, Mercedes Aguirre; and the panel’s chair Eccles Fisher Associates Director, Catherine Eccles.
Polly Russell, Head of the Eccles Institute for the Americas and Oceania at the British Library, said:
“We’re thrilled to announce the shortlist for the Eccles Institute & Hay Festival Global Writer’s Award 2026. This year’s projects explore the Americas in bold and original ways through the British Library’s collections. With themes ranging from women and colonialism, Caribbean fatherhood, Japanese-Chinese migration to the USA, the legacy of Eldorado, and the ancient Mixtec world, there is truly something for everyone. Choosing the winners from such an exceptional group of writers will be no easy task.”
Cristina Fuentes La Roche, International Director at Hay Festival, said:
“This year’s Eccles Institute & Hay Festival Writer’s Award shortlist offers a range of new perspectives on the Americas – our shared histories, challenges, and hopes for the future. I am looking forward to seeing each of these projects develop in the coming years – it is an honour to support and share their work through this platform.”
The winners will be announced at an awards reception at the British Library on Monday 24 November.
For more information visit https://www.hayfestival.org/eccles-institute-hay-festival-writers-award.
ABOUT THE SHORTLISTED WRITERS
Carmen Ávila
Carmen Ávila has received various awards in Mexico, including the Ignacio Manuel Altamirano National Novel Prize (2024), the Ramón López Velarde Floral Games Poetry Prize (2019), the Dolores Castro Prize (2017) for poetry and essay, the Rafael Ramírez Heredia National Short Story Prize (2013), and the Enriqueta Ochoa National Poetry Prize (2010). She also received an honourable mention in the Francisco Cervantes Vidal National Young Poetry Prize (2008). Internationally, her poetry books were finalists for the Ana María Iza International Poetry Prize (Ecuador, 2025), the Pedro Lastra Poetry Prize (United States, 2021), and the María del Villar Poetry Competition (Spain, 2007).
The judges said: “Her submitted work for the Award, La caída de los reinos de la lluvia (The Fall of the Rain Kingdoms), breathes new life into the ancient Mixtec world, drawing inspiration from pre-Hispanic codices and their later interpretations. Recounting the fascinating life and legend of Six Monkey, queen of the city-state of Huachino in present-day Mexico, Ávila’s novel seeks to revitalise the memory of Indigenous heroines across the Americas.”
Jacqueline Crooks
Raised in Southall within Britain’s vibrant Windrush Generation community, Jacqueline Crooks’ fiction work is rooted in diasporic identity, subculture and mythic memory. Her debut novel, Fire Rush, won the 2024 PEN America Open Book Award and the Society of Authors’ Paul Torday Prize. Crooks was named me one of the 10 best new novelists of 2023, and The New Yorker selected Fire Rush as one of the year’s best novels. Her new novel, Sky City, will be published by Jonathan Cape in August 2026. Alongside her writing, she is an experienced workshop leader working with socially excluded communities, including older people, refugees, asylum seekers, and disadvantaged children.
The judges said: “Out of Many, her submission for the Award is a hybrid work of auto-fiction and memoir, and a literary excavation of Caribbean fatherhood and identity. For many years, Jamaican fathers' approach to parenting has been discussed in the shadow of Edith Clarke’s classic, My Mother Who Fathered Me. In her sharp delineation of four distinct presentations of Jamaican fatherhood, Jacqueline Crooks’s proposal is refreshing and innovative, challenging perceptions and inviting readers to reflect on the complexities of heritage, masculinity and intergenerational transmission.”
Misha Ewen
With over a decade of research expertise, Misha Ewen offers a diverse voice and perspective on the histories and heritage of early modern British colonialism. She joined the University of Sussex in 2024, having previously held an academic position at the University of Bristol. Her single-authored monograph, The Virginia Venture: American Colonization and English Society, 1580-1660, was shortlisted for the Royal Historical Society Gladstone Prize. She was appointed as the first Curator for Inclusive History at Historic Royal Palaces, was the lead curator of Untold Lives: A Palace at Work at Kensington Palace and was the co-supervisor of a PhD to explore the links between the royal family and slavery, which garnered press attention in 2022 when the King announced his support for the research.
The judges said: “Her Award submission Imperial Ties: An Intimate History of Women and the British Empire, promises to uncover remarkable and overlooked histories. Focusing on figures such as Elizabeth Throckmorton, the wife of Sir Walter Raleigh, and Joan Pierce, one of the first women to set sail for Jamestown, Virginia, Imperial Ties explores how the lives of white, Black, Indigenous, and mixed-race women were entangled with colonialism – sometimes to their benefit, sometimes to their detriment, and often to the detriment of others.”
Rowan Hisayo Buchanan
Rowan Hisayo Buchanan is the author of Harmless Like You, Starling Days, and The Sleep Watcher. She is the editor of the anthologies Go Home! and Dog Hearted. Her short work has appeared in Granta, The Paris Review, The Atlantic, East Side Voices, The Guardian, and The New York Times. She has been shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award and won the Authors’ Club First Novel award and a Betty Trask Award. Her work has been a New York Times Editors’ Choice and an NPR Great Read. She is also a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
The judges said: “Her award submission, The Cloud Pruners, will be a fictionalised retelling of the love story between her Chinese grandmother and Japanese grandfather in New York in the aftermath of the Second World War. It will ask how migrants can plant histories and prompt us to think about the American Dream in a changing world, reminding us that when a country opens its doors, it is inviting in not just new bodies, but new stories.”
Vanessa Londoño
Writer Vanessa Londoño was a finalist at the 2022 National Published Novel Award from the Colombian Ministry of Culture. In 2017, she was the recipient of the Aura Estrada Literature Award at the Oaxaca Book Fair, and the Nuevas Plumas Journalistic Chronicle Award at the Guadalajara Book Fair. Her work has been published in various outlets, including El Faro (El Salvador), Americas Quarterly (Nueva York), El Malpensante (Colombia), Revista Brando (Argentina) and Este País (Mexico).
The judges said: “Her first novel, El asedio animal (The Liminal Siege), was published internationally. She presents a compelling proposal for her book Through Arrival Waters, which explores the vast collection of imagined maps that once sought to locate the mythical South American city of Manoa — also known as El Dorado — said to lie somewhere between the western range of the Andes and the Atlantic Ocean, deep within Colombia’s interior. Londoño’s work reveals how, even as Indigenous peoples were brutally forced to convert to Catholicism, Europeans themselves were unknowingly converted to South American Indigenous mythologies, driven by their feverish obsession with gold.”
Maddie Mortimer
Maddie Mortimer is a writer from London whose work spans fiction, theatre, and screen. Her debut novel, Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies, was published in 2022 and was longlisted for the Booker Prize and the Dylan Thomas Prize, shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, and won the Desmond Elliott Prize for the best debut novel written in English. The novel was also named a ‘Book of the Year’ by publications including The Sunday Times, The New Yorker, Time Magazine, and The Washington Post, and has since been translated into twenty languages.
Alongside her fiction, Maddie is a screenwriter. She has worked in Netflix writers’ rooms and is currently developing her debut feature film. Her most recent short film was produced with the BFI and Film4.
The judges said: “An American road trip novel, Maddie Mortimer’s My Summer with Ray, will be a work of metafiction about grief, technology and the stories we tell to survive. It will feel both familiar and unsettling: a revenge tragedy on the surface, an experiment of authorship beneath. The British Library’s Americas collections will be both a resource and collaborator in building stories from the traces of lives already lived.”