2025 Speculative Fiction Competition
Shortlist announcement!
The shortlist…
The 2025 competition received a great number of submissions from around the world and our judge, Philippa Thompson,
was thrilled to have an opportunity to consider each of them. Thank you to everybody who entered; we hope
your stories and writing continue to thrive. The standard was incredibly high, so deciding on
our shortlist was no easy feat. A tough decision had to be made, nevertheless.
And so, with great aplomb, the 2025 shortlisted manuscripts and writers are…
- The Eyes Among Us by Alex Forbes
- Birkenhead and Williams by Anna Kahn
- Morenike and the Magic Slippers by Mayowa Pamela Odunaiya
- Far Sky 11 by David Taylor
- When The Enemy Comes by David Whitmarsh
- The Vampire of Taipei by Esper Yu
Final results…
We will be making and announcing our final decisions (winner, 2nd and 3rd place) within the next few weeks (Jul/Aug 2025), so please keep your eyes peeled for updates on this webpage, our Instagram and Facebook accounts.
In the meantime you can find out about each of the shortlisted writers and manuscripts below.
Prizes:
1st: editorial feedback on a full novel or novella manuscript (worth over £1000)
2nd & 3rd: feedback on the first 5,000 words of your novel plus 50% off editorial services in 2025
shortlisted writers and manuscripts
Alex Forbes
Alex Forbes is a novelist and screenwriter from Thatcham, UK. He has written and directed award-winning short films, with multiple broadcast credits including Channel 4's Random Acts and Gogglebox. He currently has a feature screenplay in development with Circus Studios.
He enjoys extreme sports, lying about his hobbies and writing about himself in the third person.
The Eyes Among Us
Two spies for the dark lord must pose as newlyweds to infiltrate the court of the king who wronged them and exact their revenge.
A fantasy spy thriller.
Anna Kahn
Anna Kahn is a Manchester-based writer. Their work has appeared in publications like The Rialto, The Rumpus and The London Magazine, and they've been a Barbican Young Poet, a member of the Roundhouse Collective (and finalist at the Roundhouse Slam) and a London Library Emerging Writer.
Birkenhead and Williams
When Val, an ex-submarine cook living under an assumed name, discovers that her murdered cousin has a job at Birkenhead and Williams, the sole office block in her tiny village in the middle of a very strange forest, she takes a job there to investigate. She discovers that the building is full of murder victims, and she must join forces with the rest of the villagers and the forest itself to save one of their own from dangerous experiments in bringing the murdered back to life.
Mayowa Pamela Odunaiya
An Alumnus of HarperCollins (UK) Author Academy-writing for children in 2021, Mayowa is a black disabled female British artist who has published poems as a result of winning competitions. At www.dreamquestone.com in 2009, Mayowa won second prize, belongs to several critique groups and is a member of SCBWI.
Morenike and the Magic Slippers
Morenike, a resilient 11-year-old Lagosian, wants to be a Nollywood actress. But when she comes across a pair of alluring slippers, they give her life-threatening nightmares! If Morenike can distance herself from trophy friends, she can save her life, discover true friendship, and fulfil her dreams of being cast as Queen Moremi Ajasoro.
David Taylor
When not writing, David works as a games developer for a small indie company in Edinburgh. He is also an actor and occasional musician. David has had a few short stories published, most recently in Gutter Magazine, but this is his first novel.
Far Sky 11
Told in first-person, the story concerns the first Martian colonists who, after uncovering a possibly fake alien artefact, begin to psychologically unravel, igniting a powder keg of paranoia, mania and high strangeness within the confines of the base.
David Whitmarsh
David is a retired software engineer who now spends his time playing guitar badly and writing. He lives in West Sussex with his wife and two cats.
When the Enemy Comes
This is a story of desperation and hope in the face of corruption, and betrayal as an implacable enemy approaches.
Esper Yu
Esper Yu is a Taiwanese-American writer and filmmaker living in London. As a wandering weirdo, he has lived in three continents, six countries, ten cities, and nineteen homes. His work is informed by his family history, struggle for identity, and search for home. ‘The Vampire of Taipei’ is his second novel.
The Vampire of Taipei
Accused of murdering each of his three wives, Howard Jin, a reclusive billionaire known as the ‘Vampire of Taipei’, recounts his uncanny life story to Mike Chang, his young driver, as they search for clues to stop a faceless killer on the eve of a Chinese invasion.
Competition Judge
Philippa Thompson is an Editorial and Events Intern at Black Blade Literary. In 2024, she graduated from the University of Glasgow with an undergraduate degree in English Literature and is currently studying a postgraduate degree in Publishing at Edinburgh Napier. Philippa really enjoys reading anything that contains dragons and books which take inspiration from classical mythology. Her favourite book series is The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien.
As this year’s competition judge, Philippa wants to read page-turning stories with utterly memorable characters, unique concepts and worlds that feel lived in.
