BBC, Vice and Wall Street journalists longlisted for £10K DRF Award

A Belfast-based book designer, a Cambridge academic and an ex-Wall Street Journal reporter are among those nominated for the £10,000 DRF Award. 

The prize, which was developed by RCW in tribute to the late literary agent Deborah Rogers, is for a first-time writer whose submission demonstrates outstanding literary talent and who needs financial support to complete their work. 

Nominated journalists include Ese Erheriene, who spent six years at the Wall Street Journal across London and Hong Kong, as well as Isa Tejera a video producer at VICE World News, and former BBC journalist Rachael Hassam, who recently gained an MA in Creative Writing from Teeside University. 

Yorkshire-based poet Neil Rollinson was selected for his foray into prose and Alicia McAuley, an editor and book designer based in Belfast who has been published in the Dublin Review and the Irish Times. 

Joining them on the longlist is Malawi-born Michelle Alipao Chikaonda, contributing editor to literary journal Electric Literature and student at University of East Anglia (UEA) along with fellow UEA student John Steciuk, a British-Ukrainian writer based in Manchester. 

Finally, Leon Edler an award-winning cartoonist and illustrator based in Leeds is also nominated alongside Louis Klee, an Australian philosopher and lecturer at Cambridge University. 

The full longlist: 

• The Dying Embers of the Setting Sun by Michelle Alipao Chikaonda (essays) 
• Maude Goes Tiny by Leon Edler (children’s book) 
• We Know What This is by Ese Erheriene (novel) 
• Every Bird Flies with its own Wings by Rachael Hassam (novel) 
• Qualms by Louis Klee (novel) 
• The Caul by Alicia McAuley (short stories) 
• The Dead Don’t Bleed by Neil Rollinson (novel) 
• The Reservoirs are Colder and Deeper Thank You Think by John Steciuk (short stories) 
• Exit Interview by Isa Tejera (novel) 

The nine-strong longlist will be whittled down to three contenders by the judging panel which is chaired by Nobel Prize-winning author Abdulrazak Gurnah, alongside former DRF-winning novelist Claire Adam, and author and journalist Annalena McAfee.  

The shortlist will announced at the beginning of next month with the award, worth £10,000, presented on 9th November. The two runners-up will each receive £1,000.

The winner of the 2021 DRF Writers Award was Mathelinda Nabugodi for The Trembling Hand: Reflections of a Black Woman in the Romantic Archive, which will be published by Hamish Hamilton in the UK following a nine-way auction and Knopf in the US in 2024.

The David Miller Internship Programme ran as part of the DRF prize in 2022.