Rebecca Jagoe and Remi Graves win the new Prototype Prize

Rebecca Jagoe and Remi Graves have won the Prototype Prize, a new, biannual award for published or unpublished writers and artists working at "the intersections of different literary and artistic forms".

Jagoe has won a prize of £3,000 for their book-length work, which will be published by Prototype, while in the short-form category Graves has won £2,000, plus publication by Monitor Books. Both will have an excerpt of their work published by frieze magazine.

The two winners were announced last night at a ceremony at the South London Gallery. The prize was judged by Bhanu Kapil, Tom McCarthy and Elizabeth Price. It is a partnership between Prototype, Monitor Books and frieze, awarding categories for book-length works and short-form works.

Jagoe won for their manuscript Significant Others, which explores "intimate or bodily relationships with other-than-humans". The author is an autistic artist who works across text, performance and sculpture.

"Jagoe’s Significant Others is a fully grown and highly original manuscript," the judges said. "It is a remarkable and beautiful piece of writing which forges a new language of material aesthetics to think and write beyond the human. There is a fluency and elasticity of invention here, resonating with the processes of artistic creation and encounter."

Meanwhile, Graves, a former Barbican Young Poet, has won for coal, an experimental pamphlet that explores the life and death of Paul Downing, a black transmasculine person from Georgia, USA. The judges commented: "Remi Graves’ coal is a genuine experiment—unconfined, unprecious, yet also precise. The elements, so varied in form, build a coherence of subject, tone, and attitude. Remi makes research itself the drama, inserting the complex subjectivity of the researcher (and the unreliability of the whole process) into the work. coal has the liveness of a whole practice."

The other authors shortlisted for the book-length category were Matthias Connor, Ellen Dillon, Kate Pickering and Oliver Zarandi. Moreover, the writers shortlisted for the short-form category were Aisha Farr, Krystle Patel and Milo Thesiger-Meacham.

The prize has been supported by Shane Akeroyd, Sadie Coles and Emmanuel Roman, and by public funding from Arts Council England. It will run again in 2026, along with the next round of Prototype’s Development Programme, which supports underrepresented and emerging writers and artists through monthly seminars, editorial development and group feedback sessions.