Announcing The Deborah Rogers Award 2027
Bernardine Evaristo chairs a panel of three judges
Two past winners celebrate publication in 2027
The Deborah Rogers Foundation announces that submissions for the 2027 Deborah Rogers Award will open on 29 September and close at midnight on 24 November 2026. A first-time writer whose submission demonstrates outstanding literary talent and who needs financial support to complete their work will be presented with £10,000. Two shortlisted writers will each receive £3,000.
The judges of the 2027 Deborah Rogers Award will be the Booker Prize winning Bernardine Evaristo as chair, joined by acclaimed writers Naomi Ishiguro and Ben Markovits. They will announce a shortlist of three shortly before the Award is presented in September 2027.
Bernardine commented:
‘I’m really looking forward to chairing the Deborah Rogers Award and discovering brilliant new talent who deserve to be financially supported. This prize makes an important contribution to the literature ecosystem where it can be incredibly difficult for new writers to break through, and its publication successes demonstrate that it has already become a powerful force for good. There are always undiscovered great writers out there and it will be an adventure finding them as we judge this prize.’
Two writers who were recognised by the 2025 Deborah Rogers Award will have their books published in 2027: Saranya Murthi’s winning novel Ratri sold at auction to Chatto & Windus and to Random House (US) and June Aming’s shortlisted novel Yellow is Not for Girls Like Me was acquired by Weidenfeld & Nicholson.
The Judges of the 2027 Deborah Rogers Award
Bernardine Evaristo is the author of ten books and numerous other works. She won the Booker Prize 2019 with her novel, Girl, Woman, Other and the Women's Prize Outstanding Achievement Award in 2025. Her award-winning novel, Mr Loverman (2013), was adapted into a BAFTA-winning BBC miniseries in 2024. She is Professor of Creative Writing at Brunel University of London, Visiting Professor of Creative Media at the University of Oxford and President Emerita of the Royal Society of Literature.
Naomi Ishiguro is the author of The Rainshadow Orphans, the first in an anime-inspired SFF trilogy, published in May 2026. Her previously published books are Common Ground (2021) and the story collection Escape Routes (2020). She’s a graduate of the University of East Anglia’s MFA Creative Writing programme, and has worked as both a secondary school English teacher and a freelance creative writing teacher. She also spent two lovely years in her early twenties as a bookseller and bibliotherapist at Mr B’s Emporium of Reading Delights in Bath.
Ben Markovits grew up in Texas, London, Oxford and Berlin. In 2008, he was a Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard and won a Pushcart Prize for a story published in the Paris Review. In 2013, Granta selected him as one of their Best British Novelists Under 40. His novel You Don't Have to Live Like This won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 2016. The Rest of Our Lives, his most recent novel, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2025. He lives in London and is a professor of Creative Writing at Royal Holloway.
Entry requirements
- Submissions should take the form of 15,000-20,000 words of a work in progress, fiction or non-fiction, which is not under option or contract.
- All submissions must be the entrant’s own original work and must not be generated or planned, either wholly or in substantial part, using artificial intelligence or other automated text-generation tools.
- Applicants may not be under contract to any publisher for any work or title in any language.
- Applications are open to writers who have not previously published a full-length book of their own prose writing (including self-published or published on-line) excluding a collection of their own poetry. They may have published short prose writing within a magazine/anthology.
- Entrants must write in the English language and reside within the British Commonwealth or Ireland.
Full submission details can be found here:
https://www.deborahrogersfoundation.org/submission-guidelines