So a thing happened in June
Having worked on The Peat Cutter’s Wife for almost a year, including workshopping it through the Curtis Brown Advanced Historical Fiction Course with the wonderful writer Kate Foster, I took a leap of hope in January 2026 and entered it into the Women’s Prize Discoveries Competition for debut authors (debut as in not traditionally published and unagented). Then I forgot about it, deliberately, because that competition is famous for its thousands of wonderful entries and what chance did I have, really?
The thing is, writing is so subjective. One effort might creep under a reader’s skin where another bounces right off. And when the readers are competition judges, getting anywhere is as much about stars and tastes aligning as craft. So the odds were long and forgetting about it was the right thing to do. I ploughed my heart and soul into my next novel - Carleton - and left The Peat Cutter’s Wife to the universe.
So when the call came in April that I had made the longlist, I was beyond thrilled. ‘Keep it under wraps until we announce it,’ they said. I told my dog, I think that was allowed. I owed her an explanation for screaming and startling her off the sofa.
Longlisted for Discoveries. Wow. And a moment here to remember that between the top thousand entries and the longlist are 983 writers who could easily have made the spot but for judges’ tastes. I am under no illusion that I am better. Just luckier.
And my luck continued because a few weeks later I made the shortlist.
The Disco Queens
A fabulous day. Thank you Women’s Prize for laying it all on. We started with a group lunch, then a tour of Bloomsbury publishing house, finishing up at the party itself. I made some great friends and left motivated.
Write, put your words out there, celebrate the wins - small or big.
Women’s Prize Website Announcement
Here I am at the Women’s Prize summer party with my fellow Longlistees - a whole new network of writer friends, and so unbelievably talented.
I learnt that Kate Mosse, the prize founding Director, has the BEST shoes, a white espresso martini is a thing (which looks suspiciously like shaken up Baileys, but you can’t go wrong with that concept), and that every writer feels like an imposter - at least every writer I met, and that was a lot.
