Styles' Australian noir about female empowerment wins £10k Wilbur Smith Prize

Debut author Emma Styles’ Australian noir, No Country for Girls (Sphere), has won the 2023 Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize for Best Published Novel worth £10,000.

Niso Smith, founder of the prize, revealed Styles as the winner at the Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize Awards Ceremony, hosted at London’s Royal Geographical Society on Wednesday (18th October). 

Run by the Wilbur & Niso Smith Foundation, the annual prize based around the ethos "an adventure for everyone" has categories for published, unpublished and young writers. It is open to writers of any nationality, writing in English. The prize received over 1,000 submissions overall from 67 different countries.

No Country for Girls was selected by judges including climate scientist and explorer Felicity Aston, Leon McCarron, an adventurer and writer, as well as Simon Savidge, journalist and founder of @SavidgeReads, plus 2022 Prize winner Giles Kristian. Votes from readers equated to one seat on the judging panel.  

Kristian said: “For this prize, No Country for Girls has everything you could want – living, breathing characters, evocative descriptions and a journey across an unforgiving landscape. It is an adventure novel through and through.”

Smith dubbed the Australian author Styles’ debut “a story of young, female empowerment and resilience” and “a resounding triumph”.

She said: “The entries this year were strong, the shortlist filled with remarkable yarns that push the boundaries of adventure fiction. It was a delight to have such diverse and inventive narratives to share with readers, a testament to this thriving genre and its ability to take readers on exhilarating journeys, through landscapes and experiences.”

Styles’ contemporary Australian road trip won the award worth £10,000 against “an incredibly strong shortlist” of six novels, organisers said, including Priscilla Morris and Paddy Crewe.

Smith also paid tribute to the librarians and library staff who volunteered to select the long and shortlists. "We had panellists from huge inner-city public libraries to tiny community-run rural libraries, from the north and south of the UK, from coastal communities and the most inland points of the country," Smith said.

The five winners of the New Voices category for aspiring writers, from across Ghana, the US and the UK. They will receive nine months of mentorship and one-to-one editorial guidance from an editor.

Rachel Johnson, head of brand at Bonnier Books who sponsor and support the award, said: “This year, it has been particularly thrilling to see such original story ideas: from a high school science teacher trying to untangle himself from an unusual criminal gang; to the tension of 10 months’ isolation in preparation for a space mission; to being dropped into a new culture with an accompanying political scandal, we have seen fresh ideas and exciting talent.”

Additionally the winners of the Author of Tomorrow award for a short adventure story by writers aged 21 were selected by a panel of young people. They included Amber XinTi Wang, Luke Zhang, Tianna Maidens and Justin Schwab.

Each of the 10 shortlisted writers worked with an editor to prepare their work for digital publication, now available in Worldreader’s app BookSmart, in an anthology titled Aliens, Apocalypse and the Afterlife. Worldreader is a global literacy charity.

Established in September 2015, The Wilbur & Niso Smith Foundation is a charity dedicated to empowering writers, promoting literacy and advancing adventure writing as a genre. The novelist Wilbur Smith died in 2021 aged 88.