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 16th year.
Six writers make up the 2027 shortlist: American writer and anthropologist Alexa Hagerty; Colombian writer and researcher Daniella Sánchez Russo; Brazilian writer, anthropologist and lecturer Hanna Limulja; Ugandan-born British poet, playwright and academic Nick Makoha; Peruvian writer, journalist and teacher Jeremías Gamboa; and Peruvian-British researcher Natalia Sobrevilla Perea.
The two winners will hold the Eccles Institute & Hay Festival Global Writer’s Award for one year from 1 January 2027. 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.
Polly Russell, Head of the Eccles Institute for the Americas and Oceania at the British Library, said:
“We are incredibly excited by the breadth and depth of the 2027 Eccles-Hay Writer's Award shortlisted projects. Including a new history of the Spanish and Latin American encounter, a re-evaluation of the artist Basquiat, reflections on the legacies of internalised racism and armed conflict, a deep dive into the environmental costs of our digital world, and an account of Indigenous cosmologies, the shortlisted projects explore complex histories and difficult legacies. They offer new ways to understand our shared challenges and showcase some of the most exciting voices writing about, and from, the Americas today.”
Cristina Fuentes La Roche, International Director at Hay Festival, said:
“We are delighted to announce the shortlist for this year’s Eccles Institute & Hay Festival Writer’s Award. Spanning non-fiction, poetry, memoir, history and a novel in verse, these projects offer a range of fresh perspectives on the Americas – common histories, the challenges we face, and what we hope the future holds. It’s a privilege to follow these projects as they develop and support these writers as their work takes shape.”
The winners will be announced at an awards reception at the British Library on Tuesday 17 November.
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; Deputy Head of the Eccles Institute, Mercedes Aguirre; and the panel’s chair, Eccles Fisher Associates Director, Catherine Eccles.
Critically acclaimed winners of the Writer’s Award include Naomi Wood (Mrs Hemingway, 2014); Andrea Wulf (The Invention of Nature: The Adventures of Alexander von Humboldt, 2015); Olivia Laing (The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone, 2016); Bob Stanley (Let’s Do It: The Birth of Pop, 2022); Imaobong Umoren (Empire Without End: A New History of Britain and the Caribbean, 2025); and Daniel Saldaña París (El baile y el incendio, 2025). Previous winners also include John Burnside, Hannah Lowe, Chloe Aridjis, Alia Trabucco Zerán and Joseph Zárate.
For more information, visit www.hayfestival.org/eccles-institute-hay-festival-writers-award
ABOUT THE SHORTLISTED WRITERS
Alexa Hagerty
Alexa Hagerty is a writer and anthropologist whose work follows the forensic search for people disappeared by Latin American dictatorships. Her first book, Still Life with Bones: Genocide, Forensics, and What Remains (Crown, 2023), was a New York Times Editors’ Choice and won the Juan E. Méndez Book Award for Human Rights in Latin America. Her second, The Future of Grief, is forthcoming with Norton Shorts. She holds a PhD in anthropology from Stanford and is a visiting scholar at ISAE-SUPAÉRO and affiliated researcher at Cambridge’s Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy. She previously co-led a working group on disability and AI with LSE and Ada Lovelace Institute’s JUST AI project.
The judges said: “A literary non-fiction about the Atacama in Chile, the driest nonpolar desert on Earth: Salt, Cloud, Ghost: A Journey through Desert, Deep Time, and Digital Age, will unfold over nine chapters, each anchored in a single site in the desert, and will examine mining and the minerals taken from the ground, and the digital world they are building after five centuries of extraction and histories of violence.”
Daniella Sánchez Russo
Daniella Sánchez Russo is a Colombian writer and researcher working across literary scholarship, creative writing and the cultural sector. She is the author of Vigilia (Tusquets, 2022), a novel about how Colombia’s armed conflict, economic development and domestic labour shape intimate life in the Caribbean, which will be published in English by Charco Press in 2027. She holds a PhD in Romance Languages from the University of Pennsylvania and an MFA in Creative Writing from New York University. She previously served as Director General of the Instituto Caro y Cuervo and is currently working on Rezo, a novel in verse about how political violence enters a couple’s private life.
The judges said: “From the author of Vigilia, to be published in English next year as Wakeful Hours, comes Rezo, a novel in verse about the transformation of an intimate relationship when Colombia’s armed conflict enters the lives of a couple indirectly. The project continues Daniella Sanchez’ longstanding interest in the ways collective histoires become embedded in private life.”
Hanna Limulja
Hanna Limulja is a writer, anthropologist and lecturer at the Federal University of Roraima (UFRR) in northern Brazil, where she teaches Indigenous students from the Yanomami, Ye’kwana, Wai Wai, Macuxi, Wapichana and Taurepang peoples, among others. Her doctoral research on Yanomami dreams became The Desire of Others: An Ethnography of Yanomami Dreams (UBU, 2022), a bestseller that has crossed over from academia into schools, psychoanalysis, the arts and literature, and has been translated into Spanish and Catalan. She is also the author of the children’s book Mari hi: The Tree of Dreams (UBU, 2023), which reflects on death from an Indigenous perspective. Active alongside Indigenous peoples in Brazil since 2008, she has worked with CCPY, the Socio-Environmental Institute (ISA), Wataniba and Survival International.
The judges said: “For the Amazonian Yanomami people, dreams play a crucial role in how they inhabit, understand and imagine the world. Delving into the archive, Hanna’s project will explore how Indigenous dreams were portrayed in the accounts of missionaries and travellers, and the ways in which they served as a means of resistance and challenge. We were excited by the project’s potential to illuminate Indigenous-colonial encounters through the lens of dreams and, in doing so, offer a different way of knowing and being.”
Nick Makoha
Nick Makoha is a Ugandan-born British poet, playwright and academic based in London. His second poetry collection, The New Carthaginians (Penguin, 2025), weaves Basquiat’s paintings, the 1976 Entebbe hijacking and diasporic myth into a single polyphonic sequence. It was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Jhalak Prize, longlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize, and named a Guardian Book of the Year, with a US edition forthcoming from Milkweed in 2027. His debut collection, Kingdom of Gravity (Peepal Tree Press, 2017), was shortlisted for the Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection, and his play The Dark (Fuel Theatre, 2019) toured nationally. A 2026 winner of the Cholmondeley Award, he founded the Obsidian Foundation, a UK poetry development programme for Black poets, and holds a doctorate in Creative Writing from King’s College London.
The judges said: “Nick Makoha’s proposal, The Hitek Woolf, centres on the art of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Makoha’s response to the arts’ resonances as an African diasporic poet is elegant and passionate. We were struck by the clarity, tone and confidence of Makoha’s writing which heralds an empathic enquiry into the work of Basquiat, a kind of cross-disciplinary call and response.”
Jeremías Gamboa
Jeremías Gamboa is a Peruvian writer, journalist and teacher, born in Lima in 1975 to campesino parents who migrated from Ayacucho. He is the author of the short story collection Punto de fuga (Alfaguara, 2007) and the novels Contarlo todo (2007), winner of Spain’s Tigre Juan prize in 2014 and translated into French, Portuguese and Italian, Animales luminosos (2021) and El principio del mundo (Alfaguara, 2025). His recent fiction turns to family memory, the trauma of political violence and internalised racism. A former editor at Somos, Debate and Etiqueta Negra, he edited the book accompanying the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s photographic exhibition Yuyanapaq. He holds a master’s degree in Hispano-American Literature from the University of Colorado Boulder, has taught journalism and creative writing at the Pontificia Universidad Católica and the Universidad de Ciencias Aplicadas, and is currently completing a family memoir about his father’s love of reading.
The judges said: “Cómo aparecer completamente (How to Appear Completely) is a narrative essay project by Peruvian writer Jeremías Gamboa. Combining personal memoir and historical research, the book explores internalised racism and the denial of Indigenous roots in Peru. Through his family history and research at the British Library, Gamboa will examine how colonial representations have shaped identity across generations, embarking on a deeply personal journey to reclaim his
origins and embrace an identity long denied. A timely and necessary book by a writer whose work explores the complexities of race, class and identity in contemporary Peru.”
Natalia Sobrevilla Perea
Natalia Sobrevilla Perea is a Peruvian historian, born in Lima in 1971, who specialises in the independence era and the nineteenth-century political history of the Andes. She holds a doctorate from the University of London on the political culture of Peruvian caudillos in the Guano era and taught at the University of Kent from 2007 to 2024, where she held the Chair of Latin American History. She coordinated a network of South American scholars studying the shared history of the independence movements, whose collaborative book appeared in Spanish in 2021 and is due in English in October 2026. She also led projects with the British Library’s Endangered Archives Programme to digitise regional Peruvian newspapers and archives. She is currently a researcher at the Riva Agüero Institute of the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru and is completing a project on the mid-nineteenth-century civil wars in the new South American republics.
The judges said: “Were We Never Colonies?, her submission for the award, offers a thought-provoking exploration of the historical relationship between Spain and colonial Latin America, challenging current narratives that relegate the region’s pre-Hispanic past and downplay centuries of inequality.”