Eight UK writers will be honoured in the inaugural Room to Write award, each receiving an Airbnb coupon worth £1,500, enabling them to stay in a UK location of their choosing to support focused writing:
- Tiffany Atkinson
- Helen Bain
- Yusef Bushara
- Jan Carson
- Paul Chambers
- Sophie Pavelle
- William Rayfet Hunter
- Rebecca Watson
Rooted in Hay Festival’s commitment to nurturing contemporary writing and Airbnb’s mission to enable meaningful travel and connection, Room to Write champions creativity and the importance of place and space in storytelling.
Developed with Hay Festival to support writers at a critical stage in their career, the Room to Write award recognises that time, space, and a change of environment are essential to fuel creativity and often inaccessible due to financial or personal constraints.
An accompanying digital content series, recorded at the Festival’s flagship UK edition, 21–31 May, will feature established writers sharing their top writing tips and reflections on the role of place in storytelling, to engage a wider audience in creative inspiration.
Hay Festival Global CEO Julie Finch said:
“We are pleased to celebrate these eight writers with the inaugural Room to Write awards, offering an exciting opportunity for each to have a change of scenery. As a charity, Hay Festival works to build new spaces of cultural exchange and offer artists the chance to develop their career and engage with new audiences. Enabled through our new partnership with Airbnb, Room to Write will widen access to creative inspiration.”
Lisa Marçais, General Manager Airbnb Northern Europe and Middle East said:
“We’re proud to provide eight writers with the space and freedom to bring their ideas to life on Airbnb. Unlocking creativity isn’t an exact science but we know that time, space, and a change of environment are critical elements in helping creatives produce their best work. Where you stay matters, and the choice of beautiful and bespoke homes on Airbnb could just be the creative retreat that's needed for people to find the room to write.”
The news comes on the back of a record-breaking Hay Festival 2026 and as the charity begins its international swing of events with editions upcoming in Mexico, Spain, Peru and Ukraine, as well as a new After Hours event in Birmingham, UK.
Writer biographies
Tiffany Atkinson
Tiffany Atkinson is a poet, academic and teacher based in Norwich, UK. She is the author of four poetry collections, Kink and Particle (Seren 2006), winner of the Jerwood Aldeburgh First Collection Prize; Catulla et al (Bloodaxe 2010), a Poetry Book Society (PBS) Recommendation; So Many Moving Parts (Bloodaxe 2014), a PBS Recommendation and winner of the Roland Mathias Poetry Prize; and Lumen (Bloodaxe, 2021), a PBS Recommendation and winner of the Medicine Unboxed Creative Prize. In 2022 she was awarded the Cholmondeley Award for Poetry. She is a Professor of Creative Writing (Poetry) at the University of East Anglia, where she runs the MA in Poetry and is Director of Postgraduate Research. She is completing a monograph entitled O What Can I Say: Poetry, Ethics and Embarrassment, and beginning work on a fifth poetry collection exploring silence and invisibility, with the support of a Hay Festival Room to Write Award.
“I am delighted to receive a Room to Write Award which affords me the most precious of resources right now: time and space to begin new work. I am very grateful to the Hay Festival for this rare opportunity.”
Helen Bain
Helen Bain was awarded a PhD in creative writing from King’s College London. She has been selected for emerging writers’ programmes for The London Library and the Genesis Foundation; in 2024 she won The People’s Friend Comedy Fiction Prize. Her debut novel, The Daffodil Days, about Sylvia Plath’s life in Devon in the early 1960s, was published in 2026 by Bloomsbury and Scribner, Simon & Schuster. She lives in Sussex and is working on her second novel.
“I am so hugely grateful to Hay Festival and Airbnb for including me in this kind and very generous initiative. And I am enormously excited at the immensely pleasing prospect of travelling to the far ends of the country, unplugging the WiFi, and getting my head down to work in blissful solitary silence, punctuated by windblown walks to iron out any tricky patches.”
Yusef Bushara
Yusef Bushara is a Sudanese-Bermudian editor, writer, and researcher whose work falls at the intersection of global literatures, the arts, and publishing. He is currently based in London where he works as the Non-Fiction Editorial Assistant at Jacaranda Books. His heart and mind, however, reside nearer the sea. In 2025, he released his debut poetry collection, Good News, which explores quotidian Bermudian life through his dual-heritage lens. Yusef holds bachelor's degrees in Middle Eastern Political Humanities from Sciences Po, and in English Literature from the University of Hong Kong. He earned his master’s degree in Comparative Literature from SOAS University of London, where his research focused on clarifying a Bermudian literary imagination rooted in the island's poetry.
“Space, if you can access it, is abundant in this world, though never abundant enough for the city-dwelling writer. I am extremely grateful to the Room to Write and Airbnb teams who recognise that space is a luxury so many creative professionals work hard to afford. As writers, we want to move the proverbial needle; we want to write back to the fray and make the fray think. I look forward to coming face to face with the needle and writing something that budges it, if only just.”
Jan Carson
Jan Carson is a Belfast based writer who has published four novels, three short story collections and two micro-fiction collections. Her novel The Fire Starters won the EU Prize for Literature for Ireland, 2019. The Raptures was shortlisted for the An Post Irish Novel of the Year and Kerry Group Novel of the Year. Her writing has aired on BBC Radio 3 and 4 and RTE and has been translated into twenty languages worldwide.
Jan was the Seamus Heaney Centre Fellow at Queen’s University Belfast in 2025, is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and has achieved the rank of Chevalier in the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France. Her latest novel, Few and Far Between was published in April 2026.
“I am absolutely delighted to be one of the recipients of this year's Room to Write awards. The time and space afforded by the award could not come at a better time for me; I'm excited to embark upon a whole new adventure with my writing, exploring an area of fiction I've not attempted before. I'd also like to commend Hay Festival and Airbnb for structuring the award in a way which makes it accessible and truly helpful for writers, like myself, who have lots of responsibilities and demands upon our schedules. I wish more residencies were this flexible.”
Paul Chambers
Paul Chambers is an award-winning and internationally anthologised haiku poet from Newport, South Wales. He was the founding editor of the Wales Haiku Journal, and his work has featured in such publications as The Washington Post, the TLS, The Conversation, and Caught by The River. He has collaborated on creative projects with organisations including the BBC, Mind, Cornell University, and the Centre for Environmental Humanities. Paul has been awarded for his work by the Museum of Haiku Literature in Tokyo, and his most recent collection, The Dry Bones won the Haiku Foundation’s Distinguished Book Award – the most prestigious prize in the field of English-language haiku.
“I am thrilled to receive a Room to Write award. My current project is a book-length collection of haiku exploring the River Usk from source to estuary. As a working-class writer balancing employment and family commitments, opportunities for sustained time in the landscapes I write about are precious. This award will allow me to spend meaningful time in the upper Usk valley and develop the manuscript in ways that would otherwise be difficult to achieve. The stay will not simply provide time and space to write; it will become part of the creative method itself. Time spent within these landscapes will help shape the work and contribute to a fuller understanding of the river as a whole. I am deeply grateful to Hay Festival and Airbnb for their support and excited to see where this time beside the river will lead.”
Sophie Pavelle
Sophie Pavelle is a science communicator from Exeter, Devon. Her debut book Forget Me Not: finding the forgotten species of climate-change Britain, was published by Bloomsbury in 2022 and won The People’s Book Prize for Non-Fiction (2023) and was longlisted for the 2023 James Cropper Wainwright Prize for Conservation Writing. She works in conservation communications and advocates for national literacy, holding positions with the Wildlife Trusts, Beaver Trust, the RSPB England Advisory Committee and UNESCO Exeter City of Literature. Sophie co-hosts the podcast For What It’s Earth, and has scripted and narrated multi-award-winning nature documentary shorts, such as Restoring The Rainforest.
Sophie’s writing appears in Atmos, the Times Literary Supplement, New Scientist, National Geographic Traveller, the Guardian, Resurgence & Ecologist, and others. Her latest book To Have or To Hold: nature’s hidden relationships (Bloomsbury, 2025) was longlisted for the Wainwright Prize for Conservation Writing and is published in paperback this summer.
“Finding the headspace to think, dream, trial and error, read and research - and to shape all of that into words that carry meaning - often feels as rare and fragile as the species and landscapes I write about. Too often, it slips to the bottom of the list, overshadowed by the demands of full-time work and life’s many to-dos.
“To be awarded this prestigious opportunity for time, solitude and creative freedom through the Hay Festival and Airbnb is an honour. On the threshold of a project set to be my most challenging yet, ‘Room to Write' promises a level of writerly support both rare and deeply meaningful, for which I am incredibly grateful. I can’t wait to begin!”
William Rayfet Hunter
William Rayfet Hunter is a British-Jamaican writer from the North West of England. They now live and work in East London. Their writing has appeared in fourteen poems, The Fence, Dazed, VICE, and The Observer. Sunstruck, their debut novel, won the #Merky Books New Writers' Prize 2022.
“I am deeply honoured to have been awarded the Room to Write award. The opportunity to spend dedicated time writing is a rare gift, providing the solitude, focus, and creative space that are often difficult to find in everyday life. This stay will give me the uninterrupted time I need to make significant progress on my new novel, allowing me to immerse myself fully in the work and bring the project closer to completion. I am incredibly grateful for this support and excited to make the most of this opportunity.”
Rebecca Watson
Rebecca Watson is a novelist. Her debut novel little scratch (2021) was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize and the Desmond Elliott Prize and was adapted into a play in London. Her second novel I Will Crash was published in 2024 to critical acclaim and was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize. Watson's non-fiction has been published widely, including in the Guardian, Granta and British Vogue. In 2022, she presented a documentary for Radio 4 – where her short stories have also aired. She is a commissioning editor and columnist for FT Weekend and lives in London.
“I’m delighted that Hay Festival have chosen me as one of the recipients for their Room to Write award. It'll open up a vital research opportunity for my third novel – and the time and space I need to get ahead on the next draft.”