Inaugural Weatherglass Novella Prize winners announced

Kate Kruimink and Deborah Tomkins have been named the first winners of the inaugural Weatherglass Novella Prize, chosen by Ali Smith. 

Both winners of the prize, which was launched “to celebrate the vitality and relevance of the novella form", will now be published by Weatherglass Books. The winners were chosen from more than 150 submissions of novellas of between 25,00 and 40,000 words. 

The team at Weatherglass Books shortlisted five novellas, with Smith picking the winners. 

Smith said: “The shortlist, in totality, was one of the most pleasurable and exciting things I’ve read in quite some time. The ways in which its writers dealt with the short-but-long/long-but-short constraints of the form; the problems and the opportunities that this gave them; and the remarkable standard of the writing from entry to entry reminded me that the novella form is a kind of marvel.” 

Kruimink’s novella Astraea takes place on a convict ship, full of women and their children bound for the Antipodes. It will be published by Weatherglass Books on 29th August 2024. Aerth by Tompkins is a tale of twin planets Ice Age Urth and Aerth. It will be published on 30th January 2025. 

The other shortlisted titles were: We Hexed the Moon by Mollyhall Seeley, which will be published by Weatherglass Books in Autumn 2025, The Guest by Leena Ronalds and Mosaic by Amanda Schmidt.