At long last, we are delighted to announce our winners for this year’s Harry Bowling Prize for New Writing. You can find out more about why the judges’ thought these entries stood out here.

Novel writing prize

Winner

I know we say this every year, but it really was hard to choose a winner as we loved all our shortlisted entries and could see merit and talent in each and every one, which led to some quite spirited discussion! Our judges, Laura Longrigg from MBA Literary Agents and Headline’s Director of Publishing Marion Donaldson, eventually picked a winner and we can’t wait to meet the author when she joins us for her exclusive mentoring session. We’re very proud to announce that our 2014 winner is:

Special commendation

We didn’t intend to have runners up this year, but the judges thought that these two entries really stood out, so please forgive us for not sticking to our intentions and join us in congratulating:

Flash fiction prize

Our flash fiction prize winner was equally hard to call – all three of the shortlisted stories are superbly plotted and all have a twist to the tale. But in the end our judges decided that one story stayed with them long after they’d finished reading, and they felt this should be the winning entry. Intense, emotional and memorable, it makes you want to climb into the story and shout ‘Don’t go’! But we won’t spoil things for you as we have published it on our website and you can read it here. We hope you love it as much as we do.

Congratulations to all of you from everyone at the Harry Bowling Prize.