The Bath Novel Award is a £3,000 international prize for unpublished and independently published novelists writing for adults
Submissions were invited from 1st December 2021 to 31st May 2022 and are now closed for judging.
This year’s judge is NELLE ANDREW who is the British Book Awards’ current Literary Agent of the Year; the most prestigious accolade for a literary agent based in the UK. Here’s what Nelle is looking for in a winning manuscript: ‘Utter absorption. That moment when you think, oh I don’t want to do anything else. Whether it is the voice, or the plot, or the hook or just the link by link amazing writing.’
The author of the winning manuscript will receive £3,000 and all shortlistees win feedback on their full manuscript and literary agent introductions. One longlistee will win a place worth £1,800 on acclaimed online course Edit Your Novel the Professional Way from co-sponsors Professional Writing Academy and Cornerstones Literary Consultancy
Submissions are the opening 5,000 words plus one page synopsis of novel manuscripts for adults or young adults which are complete at over 50,000 words.
Entry is £29 per novel with sponsored places available for writers on a low income
Bath Novel Award Recipients
2021 ABHISHEK PRASAD for Ghost Time (Greyhound Literary Agency 2021)
2020 ANDREW J KING for The Arrow Garden (Aderyn Press 2023)
2019 KATE SIMANTS for A Ruined Girl (Viper Books 2020)
2018 ABI DARÉ for The Girl with the Louding Voice (Hodder & Stoughton 2020)
2017 SOPHIE DRAPER for Cuckoo (Avon Books 2018)
2016 KIM SHERWOOD for Testament (Riverrun 2018)
2015 CLARISSA GOENAWAN for Rainbirds (Soho Press 2017)
2014 JOANNA BARNARD for Precocious (Ebury Press 2015)