Meet Our 2026
Shortlisted Writers
We entered the Tom Grass Prize for Year 2 with a sense of excited expectation, and those expectations have been richly met.
The call for short fiction or non-fiction responding to the spirit of adventure can be interpreted in endless extraordinary ways. It was thrilling to hear voices from around the world, and share diverse experiences of love, conflict, and self-discovery, stretching the physical and the emotional boundaries of adventure.
We received 527 submissions from 52 countries across 6 continents. The standard was extremely impressive. With thanks to all the writers who entered, we are very excited to announce the jury's nominations of our shortlist and finalists.
The Shortlist
If You Were a Dog, This Wouldn’t Have Happened
Valo Christiansen, Germany
Pretty China
Elizabeth Cooke, UK
The Last Hike
Christian Emecheta, Nigeria
Every Twenty Minutes
Elia Isaac, UK
The Pride of Prestwick
Bryony Lorimer, Canada
Still Hers
Rahila Mmahi, Nigeria
Girls On The Moon
Leila Taheri, UK
Ash & Saltwater
Lily Woodberry, Australia
Because I Want To
— Maria Sol Beker (Argentina)
🇬🇧 UK
Maria Sol Beker is an Argentine writer and human rights lawyer. She has spent over a decade investigating violations of international human rights and humanitarian law in conflict zones - including Afghanistan, Colombia, Myanmar, Syria, Yemen, Nicaragua, and Ukraine - for the United Nations. Her nonfiction has appeared in Brevity, Word/Iron Oak, and Republic of Letters, and she writes a Substack called Field Notes from the Spine. She was born in Gualeguaychú, Entre Ríos, and left a banking career in 2010 to travel alone through South America, India, Nepal, and Southeast Asia.
Judge, David Clifton, comments, “I found "Because I want to" a very honest, insightful and richly observed piece. It expresses strongly how travel and adventure can merge with self-discovery and new paths in life.”
Synopsis
The essay is drawn from my experience leaving a legal career in Argentina to travel alone through South America, South Asia, and Southeast Asia — a journey that eventually led to a career investigating human rights violations in conflict zones for the United Nations.
If You Were a Dog, This Wouldn’t have Happened
— Valo Christiansen (Germany)
🇺🇸 USA
Valo Christiansen is a queer writer, spoken word artist and translator. Their writing and performances bring attention to subjects such as queerness, gender, and feminism,neurodivergence, and disability. In 2023 they co-edited the first German anthology featuring only trans, inter, nonbinary, and agender writers. Valo lives with their chosen family and many books in Bochum, Germany, where they host a monthly queer writing circle.
Judge, Luigi Bonomi, comments, “‘One of the most imaginative and moving pieces of prose that I have read in a long time. Empowering and empathic – it explores gender transitioning in a brilliantly sensitive and thought provoking piece of writing.”
Synopsis
As a trans and [gender] queer writer, my identity and everything connected to it has been aconstant subject throughout my work. Changing my name has been a crucial step, aliberating one yet the question remains if one can ever be free of one’s histories and how one’s histories influences one’s presents and futurities.
Pretty China
— Elizabeth Cooke
🇬🇧 UK
Elizabeth Cooke is a London-based writer whose short fiction has been shortlisted for the Fish Publishing Prize, longlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize and been a Women on Writing runner up. She trained as an actor before taking a practical detour into the corporate world, and now writes whenever she can - jotting down notes in the margins of everyday life.
Judge, Praise Ukpai, comments, ““Pretty China” is haunting and utterly unforgettable. It balances tenderness and unease with confidence and emotional clarity, drawing us deeply into a child’s love for her complicated, fragile mother.”
Synopsis
Pretty China explores a young teenage girl’s intimate and often frightening relationship with her mother, whose fragility conceals a longing for freedom. It explores the ways children absorb, respond to, and try to protect the adults they depend on. At its heart, the piece is about the quiet, strange, emotional adventures of everyday life - the small, intense moments when the world shifts and both child and parent are tested, stretched, and transformed.
The Last Hike
— Christian Emecheta
🇳🇬 Nigeria
Christian Emecheta is a Nigerian writer and self-awareness advocate. A two-time shortlisted nominee for the Nigerian Students Poetry Prize and a recipient of the BAOBAB Award (2019), he was also shortlisted for the Joe Ushie Literature Foundation Award in 2026 and is an Obsidian Foundation Fellow (2025). He served as a volunteer editor for the Poets In Nigeria @10 Anthology (2025). He is also a published contributor to Cranked Anvil Press, Walden's Poetry and Reviews, and Mocking Owl Roost, among other publications too numerous to mention. Christian finds inspiration through reading, film, and the boundless landscapes of his imagination.
Judge, Laetitia Rutherford,, comments, “I was drawn in by the plain-speaking narrator, some days Itunu of the petrol pump, other days a guide through the treacherous pass known as Devil’s Throat. This story then unfolds like novel in miniature, with Ituni’s understanding of her life reshaping in light of a shocking discovery.”
Synopsis
The Last Hike is an adventure story about reckoning with the past, with loss, and with the debts we owe the dead. Set in the fictional Nigerian town of Ikoro, it follows Itunu Adeleke, a young woman who works at a petrol station by day and guides hikers through a dramatic gorge called Devil's Throat when free. Nine years earlier, her father vanished without explanation, leaving her and her mother with many questions and no answers. When a wealthy, elderly stranger arrives asking to be taken to a remote plateau at the far end of the gorge, Itunu agrees. What unfolds over the course of that night's hike will interest you as you read this story.
Every Twenty Minutes
— Elia Isaac
🇬🇧 UK
Elia Isaac is a writer living in south east London, working across poetry, theatre and literary fiction. Elia won the 2024 Verve Poetry Festival Competition and the 2025 Disabled Poetry Prize. Their work has been supported by Audible’s Emerging Playwrights Fund, Spread the Word’s Writers Commissions and The Literary Consultancy’s Free Reads programme. Elia is currently working towards their first novel, supported by a Developing Your Creative Practice (DYCP) award from Arts Council England in 2025.
Judge Justin Wateridge comments, “An understated yet powerful piece of reportage: “But much of the time, solidarity meant living inside someone else's uncertainty and trying not to mistake stillness for peace.”
Synopsis
Every Twenty Minutes is a piece of non-fiction drawn from the seven weeks I spent doing solidarity presence work in Masafer Yatta, in occupied Palestine, between January and March 2026 - accompanying shepherds, sleeping in Palestinian homes under threat of attack, and keeping nightwatch.
The Pride of Prestwick
— Bryony Lorimer (Canada)
🇳🇱 The Netherlands
Bryony Lorimer is a Scottish writer based in Edmonton, Canada. Her fiction often explores the subtle moments when a person’s understanding of themselves shifts. She loves to run, travel, and play the violin, and is completing a Creative Writing Certificate through the University of Toronto.
Judge, Adele Grass, comments, “For me, this moving and courageous life defining adventure is braver by far than any mountain hike.”
Synopsis
This story was inspired by the Swedish DJ Avicii. I wanted to depict a person who outwardly has a blessed life but still struggles internally. I tried to make the writing feel similar to the way he perceives music as a part of himself. I set the story in Prestwick, mostly inspired by the airport. Although I live in Canada now, I'm from Scotland.
When My Spirit Fled, and Danced
— Freya Kristin Masters
🇬🇧 UK
Freya Masters is a writer and science communicator based in Oxfordshire. When she’s not science writing, Freya writes creatively. She is currently working on her first novel, a work of historical fiction. She has authored a science fiction short story in Nature’s Futures (entitled ‘Seams’) and in 2023 she was shortlisted for The Page Turner Award’s Young Writer Award. Freya lives with a progressive condition, a subtype of muscular dystrophy. This means living life a little more slowly - apart from recently, when she took the bullet train through an enchanting, autumnal Japan, and hurtled down a mountain in a sit-ski in the French Alps.
Judge X, comments, “MOCK COPY _ MOCK COPYMOCK COPY _ MOCK COPYMOCK COPY _ MOCK COPYMOCK COPY _ MOCK COPYMOCK COPY _ MOCK COPYMOCK COPY _ MOCK COPYMOCK COPY _ MOCK COPYMOCK COPY _ MOCK COPY
Synopsis
‘When My Spirit Fled, and Danced’ captures my time disabled skiing – using a sit-ski – at the beginning of this year, in Méribel, France. I live with a subtype of Muscular Dystrophy, a progressive muscle-wasting disease. I am fortunate to have a beloved friend whose family took me skiing, so I could experience heights and speeds I could never hope to reach. The only way I can truly express what this felt like – and my gratitude – is through writing.
Still Hers
— Racial Mmahi
🇳🇬 Nigeria
MOCK BIO - MOCK BIO - MOCK BIO - MOCK BIO - MOCK BIO - MOCK BIO - MOCK BIO - MOCK BIO - MOCK BIO - MOCK BIO - MOCK BIO - MOCK BIO - MOCK BIO - MOCK BIO - MOCK BIO - MOCK BIO - MOCK BIO - MOCK BIO - MOCK BIO - MOCK BIO - MOCK BIO - MOCK BIO - MOCK BIO - MOCK BIO - MOCK BIO -
Judge, Justin Wateridge, comments, “A simple but effective writing style that grows and grows on you.”
Synopsis
When I saw the call for stories and the theme, I stepped back to think about the issues that really matter. As a mature woman, wife, and mother, what are some subtle forms of abuse that women live through on a regular basis that society has failed to recognize, and the marriage institution has normalized? I finally decided this was the story I needed to tell. Even though my protagonist is from Nigeria, Ojone's story is the story of so many women around the world. The details may differ, but the psychological effects are real. This story deserves to be told, and deserves much more to be heard by everyone who cares about bringing healing to homes. My aim is to show women that they can look within despite the broken places culture and ignorance have placed them, and hopefully find the courage to make choices that matter.
Girls On The Moon
— Leila Taheri
🇬🇧 UK
Leila Taheri is a British-Iranian writer currently reimagining the Persian myth of Zahhāk in a
novel-in-progress that won the 2026 London Writers Centre Award for Literary Fiction. She is
also working on a short story and poetry collection that explores Iran through myth, nature,
and nostalgia. Her short fiction has been recognised by The Masters Review and First Page
Literature. She co-founded award-winning eco-design group Edgy Collective, leads the environmental group Friends of the Welsh Harp, and has written various non-fiction pieces based on her environmental work.
Judge, David Clifton, comments, “"Girls on the Moon" is a wonderfully original, evocative and beautiful story. It says a lot with relatively little, and one has the feeling that one is there with the narrator over the course of the day.”
Synopsis
‘Girls On The Moon’ follows a young woman during the recent uprising in Iran. This is a story about the courage it takes to act in the face of oppression, the connections that form when you do, and its consequences. It is about adventure — in its purest, most human form — and hope. As an Iranian woman myself, I hope it lingers with you.
Ash & Saltwater
— Lily Woodberry
🇦🇺 Australia
Lily Woodberry is a writer and settler-descendant from lutruwita/Tasmania, the heart-shaped island at the bottom of the world. Her poetry has been recognised by publications including Island, Sprig, Jacaranda, Demure, Varnish and more, and her short fiction was shortlisted in the 2025 Emerging Writers’ Festival Speculate Prize.
Judge, Deok Joo Rhee. comments, “MOCK COPY _ MOCK COPYMOCK COPY _ MOCK COPYMOCK COPY _ MOCK COPYMOCK COPY _ MOCK COPYMOCK COPY _ MOCK COPYMOCK COPY _ MOCK COPYMOCK COPY _ MOCK COPYMOCK COPY _ MOCK COPY
Synopsis
Within us all, there is a landscape. In Lily’s chest thunders the surf of larapuna/Bay of Fires, steady as a pulse. Ash & Saltwater – an experimental biography of this place – opens with the land telling its own story through the textures and sensations of deep time. larapuna feels every being deeply – prehistoric creatures, First Peoples, first invaders. Then, Lily tells the land’s story through her experience of time. She’s a wary eight-year-old, standing at the tideline. She’s eighteen, sunburnt and speeding home. She’s twenty-four, faraway, holding a shell to her ear. Ultimately, Ash & Saltwater offers that the landscapes within us do not belong to us. We belong to them.