The winners of the inaugural Martha Mills prize for young writers have been chosen from more than 1,000 entrants.
Izzy Cooper, Flynn Alexander Hampson and Mabel Swift have been announced as the winners of the award, which was launched by the London Review Bookshop and open to writing by 11-14 year olds.
“The young writers showed immense talent – sparks of literary imagination were flying everywhere,” read the announcement, posted on the London Review Bookshop blog. Each winner will receive £200 and a selection of books, and have their work published in a prize pamphlet.
The prize was set up in memory of the daughter of Merope Mills, editor of the Guardian’s Saturday magazine, and Paul Laity, an editor at the London Review of Books. Martha, who was a keen writer, died in 2021 aged 13.
The award sought “lively, unusual or otherwise original” writing on the theme of “The Stranger”. Young writers were invited to submit a piece of prose of up to 500 words. The judging panel for the first year of the competition comprised Mills and Laity, the London Review Bookshop’s Gayle Lazda and the writer Katherine Rundell.
The runners up, who will also be published in the pamphlet, are Nicholas Bailey, Christabel Fletcher, Martha Gibbins, Anastasis Henningham, Hugo Hodson, Grace Osei-Wusu, A Pancho, Magdalena Pietravalle, Aadam Qureshi, Leo Smith and Theo Berrisford Sweet.
“The best of the entries had an original vision or interpretation and managed in a short piece to fully realise it, with a highly accomplished style and wit, often subverting our expectations,” said Laity and Mills.
“It was hugely pleasurable to read all the entries for the prize”, they added. “We were transported by chases down dark alleyways, aliens, amnesia, quite a bit of violence and some really nasty parents. There was plenty of ‘stranger danger’ but also welcome and sophisticated reminders of our obligations to people unknown to us, and different.”
The three winners “blew us away”, they said, describing Mabel Swift’s piece about a mysterious dancing stranger as “lyrical and expressive” with a “timeless, mythic quality”. Meanwhile Flynn Alexander Hampson’s entry was one of many the panel read that explored dementia and people becoming strangers to themselves and others. In Flynn’s work this theme was “particularly well achieved and surprising”, Mills and Laity said, showing “impressive maturity”. And Izzy Cooper’s tale explored AI “with such a light touch and a delightful twist”.
“There was a staggering amount of talent on display – we hope not only the winners but all the entrants will carry on writing.”
The prize is set to run annually, and next year children’s author Philip Pullman will sit on the judging panel.
Mills and Laity said that Martha’s “great curiosity and imagination” inspired the new award. “Every birthday and Christmas our daughter Martha would ask for the same presents: a notebook and a snow globe.”
“By the time she died, aged 13, she was an enthusiastic writer with dozens of snow globes and piles of notebooks bursting with book ideas.”
Details of how to order the pamphlet featuring the winning stories will be announced soon, according to the London Review Bookshop website.
