With thanks, the judges of the 2026 McKitterick Prize:

Susmita Bhattacharya

Susmita Bhattacharya is an Indian-born writer living in Hampshire. Her debut novel, The Normal State of Mind (Parthian) was longlisted at the Mumbai Film Festival, 2018. Her short story collection, Table Manners (Dahlia Publishing) won the Saboteur Award for Best Short Story Collection and was serialised for BBC Radio 4 Extra. She is co-founder of the ACE-funded ‘Write Beyond Borders Mentoring Programme’ and ‘Bridges not Borders’ project. She is a multidisciplinary artist who does several projects in schools and the community in the Solent region and has co-edited Flash Fusion: An Anthology of Flash Fiction & Conversations on Craft by South Asian Writers.

Rebecca Foster

Rebecca Foster is a freelance proofreader and literary critic. From Maryland, USA, she has now lived in England for over 15 years. Her first degree was in English and Religion; she also has an MA in Victorian Literature from the University of Leeds. An associate editor for Bookmarks magazine, she reviews books for multiple print and online publications on both sides of the pond, including BookBrowse, Foreword Reviews, Shelf Awareness, the Times Literary Supplement and Wasafiri, as well as on her blog, Bookish Beck. She volunteers in her local library and is an avid follower of literary prizes.

Aamer Hussein

Aamer Hussein was born in Karachi, Pakistan, in 1955, and moved to London in 1970. He has been writing fiction since the mid-‘eighties, and his work has been widely anthologised in many languages including Spanish, Arabic, Japanese and Urdu. He is the author of the short story collections, Mirror to the Sun (1993); This Other Salt (1999); Turquoise (2002); Cactus Town and other stories (2002); Insomnia (2007); 37 Bridges (2014); Love and its Seasons (2017) and, most recently, What is Saved (2023). His other works include Another Gulmohar Tree (2009), a novella, was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Eurasia Region, Best Book); and s novel, The Cloud Messenger (2011). He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2002.

Wenyan Lu

Wenyan Lu is the winner of Society of Authors’ McKitterick Prize in 2024 for her debut novel The Funeral Cryer. She is represented by Kemi Ogunsanwo at Seventh Agency. Wenyan holds a Master of Studies in Creative Writing from the University of Cambridge. She is also a literary translator, and she teaches Creative Writing. The Funeral Cryer won the SI Leeds Literary Award before publication in the UK (Allen & Unwin), North America (Harper Collins), Italy (Garzanti) and Russia (MTS Library). The Funeral Cryer was also Books Are My Bag’s Fiction of the Month and one of Kobo’s Best Fiction of the Month for May 2023. Wenyan lives with her husband and their two children in Cambridge.

Kathy O’Shaughnessy

Kathy O’Shaughnessy has worked as Deputy Editor of the Literary Review, Arts and Books Editor of Vogue, Literary Editor of the European, and Deputy Editor of the Telegraph Arts and Books. She has done Book Choice for Channel 4, and has reviewed books for the Guardian, the TLS, the Telegraph, the Times, the Financial Times, the Independent, the Observer, New Statesman, Spectator, Evening Standard and other publications, as well as the World Service. Kathy also edited and introduced Incompatible Animals, poems in English written by the Croatian poet Drago Stambuk, and her short stories have been published by Faber in First Fictions.

Nick Rennison

Nick Rennison is a writer, editor and bookseller with a particular interest in modern history and crime fiction. He is the editor of six anthologies of short stories and has written books on a wide variety of subjects from Freud and psychoanalysis to the history of Bohemian London. His two novels, Carver’s Quest and Carver’s Truth, are both set in nineteenth-century London. He is a regular reviewer for the Sunday Times, for which he has written a monthly column on historical fiction for more than a decade. He has in the past been a judge for the Historical Writers’ Association Gold Crown for historical fiction and for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award.

Tom Vowler

Tom Vowler is an award-winning author living in the UK. A university lecturer with a PhD in creative writing, his work has featured on BBC radio and been translated into multiple languages. He tutors for Arvon and his latest book is a collection of flash fiction, titled The Trajectory of Ghosts. In 2024 he won the V.S. Pritchett Short Story Prize.