Cin, Cassidy and Mortimer shortlisted for Desmond Elliott Prize

Debuts by Tice Cin, Luke Cassidy and Maddie Mortimer have been shortlisted for the £10,000 Desmond Elliott Prize. 

All three works feature female protagonists “who have been dealt a difficult hand, from heartbreak to economic deprivation to a devastating medical diagnosis” said organisers the National Centre for Writing. The annual prize is given to the best debut novel written in English and published in the UK.

Cin is shortlisted for Keeping the House (And Other Stories), which offers a fresh take on the machinery of the north London heroin trade, lifting the lid on a covert world thriving just beneath notice. Spanning three generations, it is the story of the women who keep their family – and their family business – afloat, juggling everything from police surveillance to trickier questions of community, belonging and love. Chair of judges Derek Owusu said the novel is “lyrical, poetic, and music-like in its rendering of the life and times of north London’s working class”.  

Cassidy made the cut with Iron Annie (Bloomsbury), which tells the tragic yet hopeful story of Aoife, a woman who knows almost everyone in Dundalk’s underworld. When Aoife meets Annie, a beautiful whirlwind of a person, Aoife’s desire to learn more quickly becomes a need, and then an obsession – to know this dangerous woman, to love her, to keep her. Owusu praised the work as “an incredible debut, filled with energy, oddball characters and a lot of compassion”. 

Mortimer completes the list with Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies (Picador) in which a sudden diagnosis upends Lia’s world and the boundaries between her past and her present begin to collapse. As the voice prowling in Lia takes hold of her story, the reader is taken on a symphonic journey through one woman’s body. Owusu said the book was “precocious, heart-breaking and stunningly innovative". 

Owusu, who won the prize in 2020 for his debut That Reminds Me (#Merky Books) was joined on the judging panel by journalist and author Symeon Brown and Cheltenham Literature Festival’s programme and commissioning manager Lyndsey Fineran.  

The prize is part of the centre’s early career awards portfolio, which also includes the University of East Anglia (UEA) New Forms Award, worth £4,000, for an innovative and daring new voice in fiction, and the Laura Kinsella Fellowship, also worth £4,000, to recognise an exceptional writer who has experienced limiting circumstances. The shortlistees for the UEA New Forms Award are Vida Adamczewski, Rachel Cleverly and Jasmine Farndon. The shortlistees for the Laura Kinsella Fellowship are Kathy Hoyle and Cate West. 

Peggy Hughes, executive director at the National Centre for Writing, said: “We’re delighted to reveal the shortlisted names for the Desmond Elliott Prize, the Laura Kinsella Fellowship and the UEA New Forms Award: a hugely exciting and talented set of writers all in the early days of their writing careers.  It is never an easy task for our judges to whittle the longlists down to shortlists of three and we very much enjoyed hearing Derek, Lyndsey and Symeon’s thoughts on these highly imaginative and original books.” 

The winners of all three awards will be announced on 1st July and all will benefit from a tailored programme of support from the National Centre for Writing, supported by Arts Council England.