Our judge, literary agent Richard Pike of Curtis Brown, commented:

“The six novels I’ve had the pleasure to read showcase all that’s exciting about the very best of new fiction, from confident and original narration, intriguing and rich settings, through to engaging and deft plotting. Every novel on the shortlist excelled in one or more these areas, with this year’s winner perhaps demonstrating the best balance of each essential ingredient.

As with all first novels, as well as the promise of the new, there will also be areas for each writer to look at developing and enhancing with the guidance of an editor, but I hope you agree that each of these authors shows genuine talent, and I’m confident you will enjoy reading the first chapters of each novel."

Hannah grew up in rural Victoria in Australia and then completed a Bachelor of Laws and a Bachelor of Creative Arts (Creative Writing major) at The University of Melbourne, which also included a six-month undergraduate exchange to study at the University of East Anglia.

Now based in East London, Hannah works for a homelessness charity and writes for both adult and YA audiences in her free time. Take Flight was shortlisted for the 2016 Impress Prize for New Writers and longlisted for the 2016 Bath Children’s Novel Award.

“When I was a teenager I adored John Marsden novels, especially his Tomorrow series. Ellie, the narrator in that series, is an incredibly strong, honest, creative and funny young woman and I think she’s the standard for protagonists for me; I want to try to write characters that readers can be as invested in as I was in Ellie when I was about 15. In the way that the Tomorrow series commented on national security and our overuse of resources, I wanted to write something about two big issues that are relevant for young adults today – climate change and migration, particularly refugees. I started writing Take Flight in 2014, before even realising that ‘cli-fi’ (climate change fiction) was a growing genre.”

Sylvia lives in the west highlands of Scotland and loves being near the sea. Working as a secondary teacher made her aware of how young peoples’ futures can be frustrated by obstacles not of their own making. Their stories help to fuel her writing.

In Sea Change, a YA crime novel that doesn’t sidestep tricky issues, Sylvia wanted to capture those identity-defining moments when we are pushed right to the very edge.

Sylvia was a New Writer Awardee from the Scottish Book Trust in 2013 where she was mentored by Lindsey Fraser of Fraser Ross Associates. Her radio play, One Last Push, featured Gary Lewis and Sharon Rooney and was broadcast on BBC Radio Scotland in December, 2015. She is currently in her second year of a doctorate in creative writing at the University of Glasgow where she is researching diversity and inclusion in YA fiction. She was pleased to be selected by Penguin Random House to attend their WriteNow Live 2017 event for underrepresented writers.

Adrian Markle graduated with a BA in Creative Writing and English from the University of Victoria, Canada, before moving to the UK, where he started what would become ­Run-Off Season for his MA in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University.

“The novel was inspired by the death of someone close to me and is an exploration of how the grieving process may have differed had we been estranged. Run-Off Season is about a teenager who travels a thousand miles to fulfil his estranged, deceased father’s last request, a brutal and shocking piece of eastern religious esoterica, a Tibetan Sky Burial, and then strives to understand what kind of man his father actually was and what that means for what kind of man Cam himself will become.”

Adrian has published nonfiction in small, Canadian arts publications, and has been short- and longlisted for several fiction contests. He now lives in Cornwall, where he is writing his second novel, as a part of his PhD research at the University of Exeter. He works as a freelance editor and writer.

Sophie Wellstood is a British novelist and short story author. She grew up in rural Warwickshire in an unconventional family, and her work reflects her love of wild places and wild people.

Her fiction was first published in 2014, in Stories for Homes, an anthology for Shelter. In 2016 she won Triskele Books Big 5 competition and was longlisted for the Bath Short Story Award. Her story The First Hard Rain was shortlisted for the 2016 Manchester Fiction Prize and will be published in The Best British Short Stories Anthology 2017. Sophie lives in London and is working on a second novel and short story collection.

Like Wyn, Colour Me In‘s homeless and loveless protagonist, the novel doesn’t fit easy conventions of age or genre. “In one way or another I write about love, and about people who won’t, or can’t, behave themselves; people who are square pegs, who know they are different. There’s farce and tragedy underpinning this novel as Wyn craves security whilst being emotionally chaotic, but at its heart it’s a love story. I’ve written a dozen variations of this novel and they all come back to it being a love story.”