We are thrilled to announce that the winner of the Caledonia Novel Award 2026 is From Monsters Made by Bee Spillett.
Many congratulations to Bee, who wins £1,500 and this year’s specially-designed artwork by Edinburgh artist Lucy Roscoe.
As the author of the best novel from the UK and Ireland, Bee also wins the free place on a writing course at Moniack Mhor Creative Writing Centre.
Bee has now signed with Shanika Hyslop at Madeleine Milburn Agency.
Bee grew up adventuring on the Devonshire coast before moving to London as a teenager to study at drama school. She has worked as an actress, singer, dresser, and editor, and currently works in education. As a child, Bee would rewrite fairy tales with her best friend. Nowadays, she leans towards grittier, darker stories. As a mature student, she completed a master’s degree in creative writing at Lancaster University. She has been longlisted for the Mslexia Short Story Competition and shortlisted for the HG Wells Short Story Competition and published in their anthology The Fool. She lives in Kent with her husband, daughters, and two rather excitable dogs.
“From Monsters Made began with that ‘what if’ question. I’ve long been fascinated by Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and thought - what if there was a girl created from different fantasy beings, not wholly human? From there, my main character, Fiadh, was born, or rather reborn.
"Immediately, I knew she would have a dragon heart (I’ve always wanted to write about a dragon in a story, so this counts, in a way) and the scene where Fiadh discovers her dragonfire in a moment of rage became one of the very first extracts I had fun writing whilst on the Indie Novella writing course. From there, her character exploded into technicolour inside my head - a naïve young woman with so much power, but with no knowledge of how to control it due to her sheltered and abusive upbringing. I became so immersed with this new story that demanded my attention, I shelved the half-written novel I had been working on to breathe life into this one, and I’m so glad I did!”
Alice and Rosie: "We were immediately hooked by the distinctive voice and the fascinating use of dialect in From Monsters Made. The opening scene drew us in right away, and we were filled by an intense curiosity to find out who these unique characters were. As we discovered that Fiadh was not in fact human, but instead stitched together from various mythical creatures, we became even more intrigued, as despite her monstrous origins, we felt such a sense of empathy and kinship with her. She was a wonderful character to follow throughout the book, and we found this to be a highly original fantastical coming-of-age story at its very best."
We had over 980 entries this year, and our longlist of 17 ended up being such a fantastic range of genres, from horror to crime to family drama to literary fantasy to … oh so many more! The writing has been exquisite across the board. Getting down to one winner and one runner-up was both great fun and horribly difficult – we had a very funny and long Zoom call to make the decision! In the end, we chose Of Monsters Made and The Bone Tide because of the distinctive voices, the sheer imagination of both stories and the fantastic settings."
Rosie Pierce: " I have had so much fun judging the Caledonia Novel Award! There was so much variety in the entries - from sharp, pacy thrillers to rich to immersive fantasy by way of big-hearted love stories. We were delighted to have over 980 entries from more than 50 different countries. We are very proud to sponsor this prize. The quality of the writing has been so impressive, and I loved discussing and deliberating with my brilliant co-judges: Alice Lutyens and the prize founder Wendy Bough. It was a challenge to narrow down our excellent longlist, but we are thrilled with our shortlist and winners - Of Monsters Made and The Bone Tide blew us away with their unusual settings, distinctive voices and compelling plots."
Sandra Marslund was born in Denmark and raised mainly in England, where she now works as a Nordic translator and copywriter. While she has always loved writing fiction, she began in earnest after gaining an MA in Creative Writing from Exeter University in 2016. She went on to write a collection of short stories that placed in several competitions, including the Bath Short Story Award.
She is mum to two adult daughters and lives on the east coast of Devon with her partner. When she’s not writing or reading, she can usually be found wandering the beach with her energetic Border Collie – and thinking about writing.
"I wrote The Bone Tide fuelled by a quiet rage at the violence women are still subjected to by men in positions of power. Rather than retelling a familiar ‘me too’ narrative, I wanted to turn the power balance on its head. I have therefore created an island society, where women take the law into their own hands – and fight back. Here, it’s the men who fear going out after dark, not the women.
"The setting for the novel is inspired by my love of Nordic folklore and the rugged landscapes of Denmark’s islands, where I spent my summers as a child. Here, the traditional Danish Midsummer celebrations, with their bonfires and burning witch effigies, created a backdrop for the story’s elements of witchcraft and female resistance.
The novel is told through the synesthetic perception of Katja, one of the island’s women. Being both autistic and a synesthete myself, I wanted to explore how trauma, violence, and memory could be recalled and processed through heightened sensory experience. Katja’s memories of her time on the island therefore surface through colour, sound and sensation rather than linear recall. Equally, it was important to me to create space for alternative ways of seeing the world, and to let those ways of seeing shape the language of the story itself."
Alice and Rosie: "The Bone Tide gripped us from its opening chapter, in which a young woman tells her mother she has just killed a man, and kept us enthralled with its vivid prose and complex, dangerous, principled female characters. Its setting - a remote Danish island surrounded by vicious tides - is so compelling and atmospheric, and we loved how cleverly Sandra unravelled the mystery at the heart of the island community. It’s dark, pacy and twisty, and Sandra is such a talent."
Sandra has now signed with Liza DeBlock at Greenstone Literary Agency.
Read the start of The Bone Tide here.
Jane lives in the north of England with a husband, son and a bad-tempered cat. After a first degree in English Literature, she has an MA in TV and Radio Scriptwriting and has had a full-length play and short script in hand pieces produced. She works part time in comms and media and tries to carve out a little bit of time every day to write – or at the very least stare at the page!
A former newspaper journalist and television documentary maker, she initially wrote Monkwood as a TV drama, but despite a flurry of interest, it found itself condemned to the filing cabinet alongside a couple of radio plays, a TV series, stage plays and a full-length feature film. Fast forward a good few years, and once the paralysis of being in lockdown had subsided, it was there again, hands on hips, wanting a new start. And Monkwood the novel was born.
"There’s a seed of truth at its heart which has pursued me doggedly for over ten years, determined to be heard. Monkwood had never left me, it was there waiting patiently until I was ready to write it into being: a man is shot dead, his wife found cradling the gun and their young daughter run off into the night. A community hiding a secret. An innocent woman framed for murder and a new detective’s career ruined just to hide the truth. And another death, two decades later that might finally uncover Monkwood’s dark secrets. I had my priest pretty well mapped and a prototype for my DCI, but what I hadn’t expected was Harper to come rushing in, competing for centre-stage, nor Chrissie to speak to me in fragments.
It’s a funny old thing is writing, and that’s what I love about it, you never know when that magic might come. But writing is hard, and you have to do the work, even when the work won’t come."
Alice and Rosie: "Monkwood opens with a bang. A man is found shot dead in his home and the question of whodunnit successfully propels us throughout the novel. Twenty-two years later, Harper, the police officer on the case, is still haunted by the mysterious murder, until she meets the victim’s daughter. Together, they set out to find out what truly happened. This is crime writing at its best, with a beautifully-rendered central character, interwoven with religion, prejudice and love."
Jane has now signed with Alice Lutyens and Rosie Pierce at Curtis Brown.
Read the start of Monkwood here.
Lucy studied English Literature at Bristol University. Her own writing journey began in a traffic jam on the Tottenham Court Road with three screaming children in the car, stuck behind a red bus carrying an advert for Birkbeck College evening classes in Creative Writing. The next day she secured a babysitter and signed up for ‘Writing for Beginners’. Some years later, after numerous interruptions, she went on to complete an MA at West Dean, the Arts and Crafts college founded by poet and surrealist Edward James. After selling her corporate publishing business, which specialised in architecture and the built environment, the family moved to a small farm in Hampshire. As her last child prepares to leave home, Lucy worries constantly about becoming an empty-nester.
“Novels about families, in all their multi-generational, messy glory, are the books that absorb and delight me. Families have porous edges and there are so many ways to breach their delicate defences. The Bird’s Nest focuses on two in particular: the perils of workaholism and the threat of beady-eyed predators.
"Once I’d stumbled across the concept of bird-nesting – a way of co-parenting, where a separating couple take turns to fly in and out of the family home to care for their chicks – I realised I’d found a unique, close-quartered way to examine love, marriage and the seemingly endless demands of good parenting. What happens to the family when two people are forced to go on sharing a house, long after they’ve decided they can’t stand the sight of each other?
If this all sounds a bit grim, I hope it isn’t; I don’t enjoy reading poor me novels. Families can also be full of joy, with moments of transcendence that make meaning of our lives. When I handed the second draft of The Bird’s Nest to my own daughter and she told me she’d read it through the night in one sitting, that she both cried and laughed, I realised finally, I might be on to something.”
Alice and Rosie: "A brilliantly told story of a disintegrating marriage between two people who still truly love each other. We loved this book because each of the characters have their own wonderful individuality. They truly jumped off the page. Nesting and workaholism are topics that we don’t often see explored in fiction and Lucy delves into these themes with skill and humanity. A warm and thoughtful read."
Lucy has now signed with Alice Lutyens at Curtis Brown.
Read the start of The Bird's Nest here.
Amelia is an award-winning screenwriter and director who obtained her MFA in Film Directing from Columbia University in New York where she made short films that played in festivals around the world. Her debut feature film, The Levelling, won her a Scottish BAFTA for Best Screenwriter, and her subsequent adaptation of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde, produced as a hybrid film/theatre event with the National Theatre of Scotland during lockdown, won her a Scottish BAFTA nomination for Best Director. She is currently in early pre-production on a film about Scottish percussionist Evelyn Glennie. She considers herself a storyteller first and foremost, and while stuck in development with many film and television projects awaiting financing or cast availability, she decided to write a novel inspired by her lifelong love of crime fiction.
Alice and Rosie: "We were immediately entranced by the confident and distinct voice in The Dirty Work. Opening as it does on such a dramatic scene, we couldn’t help but race though this book. It’s a genuine page-turner. We were especially fascinated by the protagonist’s job as a forensic cleaner, and we loved the way a light was shed on an area we don’t know much about. It was particularly clever and satisfying to watch her use the skills she’s relied on in her profession to solve her partner’s brutal murder."
Amelia has now signed with Alice Lutyens and Lucy Morris at Curtis Brown.
Read the start of The Dirty Work here.
David has spent over twelve years working as a journalist and content writer in London for titles including Wired and ShortList magazine. Having studied theology at the University of Nottingham, he went on to do a master’s in journalism at Nottingham Trent University. It was then that he began writing short stories to distract himself from shorthand practice. He is drawn to novels that prioritise striking prose and unsettling ideas, such as the works of Ian McEwan, Margaret Atwood and Jeff VanderMeer. He currently looks after the content and communications of an international charity, escaping from his inbox to write mysteries, obsess over a board game, and dice with death cycling the streets of London.
“My first ideas for The Selkie came while studying theology. I was looking at the biblical elements of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and was struck by how Stoker wove together strands of vampire folklore with Christian themes and values to create a monster that has haunted us ever since.
“Since then I’ve wanted to write a mystery that draws on our fears and experiences, provoking us to ask what scares us, and what we believe in. I decided to explore the folklore of selkies after several trips to the north coast of Scotland – I fell in love with the rugged, harsh beauty of the landscape, and the haunting sense of something watching you from the water just beyond the rocks.
Alice and Rosie: "Set on a soon-to-be decommissioned oil rig, The Selkie is a brilliant, atmospheric, compelling, and genuinely terrifying horror. With shades of Then There Were None, this gripping read weaves Scottish folklore with real everyday evil. We were never quite sure whether what we were witnessing was a malevolent folkloric beast or the darker side of humanity. What an ending!"
David has now signed with Rosie Pierce at Curtis Brown.
Read the start of The Selkie here.
A Convergence of Souls by Hadiyah Sama
A Dangerous Woman 26 by Nazmin Rahman
Endura by Rosamund Conroy Now signed with Marly Rusoff at Marly Rusoff Literary Agency
Five of Diamonds by Antonia Goh
From Monsters Made by Bee Spillett Now signed with Shanika Hyslop at Madeleine Milburn Agency
In the Polar Night by Sini Hoenich
Lady Tahoe by Christa Schneider
Kennedy by Nichelle Kovacheff
Monkwood by Jane Bower Now signed with Alice Lutyens and Rosie Pierce at Curtis Brown
The Bird's Nest by Lucy Lucas Now signed with Alice Lutyens at Curtis Brown
The Bone Tide by Sandra Marslund Now signed with Liza DeBlock at Greenstone Literary Agency
The Dirty Work by Amelia Hope Now signed with Alice Lutyens and Lucy Morris at Curtis Brown
The Scatter List by Georgina Terry
The Selkie by David Cornish Now signed with Rosie Pierce at Curtis Brown
We Were Having Such a Good Time by Liv Hambrett
What the Fire Left Behind by Sharon Hyochung Kim Soldati
Young Professionals by Harry Godfrey
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