Meet the next generation of British writers – who have no truck with identity politics

For ten years, the BBC Young Writers Award has celebrated teenage writers. What does it mean to them – and how has it changed publishing?

When Elena Barham was seven years old she showed a teacher at her Barnsley primary school a story she’d written. “She told me a boy in my class was more likely to become a Formula One driver as I was a writer,” she says. “I’ve never forgotten it. Writing isn’t a visible career option where I grew up.” 
Barham has had the last laugh: a few years later she published her first poem. A few years after that, Barham won the 2022 BBC Young Writer’s Award for her Second World War-set ghost story Little Acorn, submitted when she was 18. She’s currently studying English literature at Sheffield University. “Writing can feel like a very secretive industry,” she tells me. “Unlike in the south, there are very few literary events and live poetry events where I live, so winning the award has helped me enormously. There’s a widespread misconception that the arts aren’t really wanted in the north of England.” 
For writers such as Barham, the BBC Young Writers Award is invaluable. Now in its 10th year, it offers writers between the age of 14-18 recognition, encouragement and mentorship within a London centric industry that can feel at once overwhelmingly competitive, drastically underfunded and at times even ideologically militant. Each story must be no more than 1,000 words and written in English – beyond that there are no stipulations; the five stories on this year’s shortlist, the winner of which will be announced on October 1, range from a dystopian retelling of Red Riding Hood to a comic tale about a possessive cat. Whoever wins is given a platform that in some instances can even lead to a publishing deal: Lottie Mills, winner in 2020 for her short story The Changeling and about to embark on an MPhil in English at Cambridge, published her first collection of short stories Monstrum earlier this year. 
So what does it take to win, and what does this new wave of writers and their experiences tell us about the literary scene of tomorrow and the publishing industry’s role in shaping the next generation? Plenty, as it turns out.
Brennig Davies, the inaugural winner in 2015, was 14 when he wrote Skinning – a startlingly accomplished coming-of-age allegory about skinning a rabbit, full of visceral imagery and suppressed violence. Hailing from a small village in Glamorgan, he had plenty of support from his English and Welsh language teachers as a child but always saw the publishing industry as a bit “gatekeepery”. “Winning the award definitely opened doors I thought wouldn’t have been open to me,” he says. Buoyed by the success, he graduated in English from Oxford, “which 15-year-old me would never have believed” and is now working on a novel.
Mills’s winning story, The Changeling, is equally vividly imagined: an Angela Carter-style fairy tale about a girl who grows wings along her spine. It’s similar in vein to the stories in Monstrum, which look at the body through a playful mythic lens. I tell her that when I read The Changeling, I had no idea she herself has cerebral palsy and uses a wheelchair. Mills is pleased. “My disability is a fundamental part of who I am but in my writing I want it to resonate with readers in different ways,” she says. 
Yet not every publisher she encountered understood that, although she has nothing but praise for Oneworld, who signed her. “Some of the feedback I got from meetings with publishers was that editors wanted me to focus on social realism and the difficulties of disabled people in the care system, all this stuff that my book wasn’t about. That was the first time I had this sensation: oh, you want me as a disabled person to write a very particular type of story because that’s what is sellable.” 
Atlas Weyland Eden, a 19-year-old homeschooled poet and writer from Dartmoor, won last year for The Wordsmith – a mysterious haunted fable steeped in myth and local folklore. He agrees that too many of the conversations around contemporary literature obsess over authenticity. 
“Sometimes it can feel like there is a pressure to present the correct version of reality [in fiction]” he says. “There is a sense that, if you are making art, then you have to choose a side. Of course, some works of art are inherently political, but in fantasy literature in particular, which is sometimes tempting to read as allegory, when you impose a modern lens on something written in a different time, it can feel a bit misleading.
He wonders whether this has had a deleterious impact on young writers. “I’ve noticed in different short story competitions that many of the other entries are first person, where it’s clear the author is writing about themselves. All writing is about the author, of course, but that confessional style, the inner life of someone, can often feel very shallow to me.” 
Weyland Eden is currently working on a historical novel, while Tabitha Reubens, who won in 2021 for her story Super-Powder, a formally mischievous piece about teenage self image, is working on a children’s story, The Four Quarters, about a group of warring clouds. I ask her if she worries over some of the policing that happens around children’s literature, which often finds itself at the forefront of today’s culture wars. She would prefer not to comment, but Mills, whose teacher mother refused to censor her reading when she was growing up in Hertfordshire, has very strong views on this. “There is too much worry about what children are reading,” she says. “I wrote my dissertation on the presentation of disability in classic children’s novels, including What Katy Did and The Secret Garden, and although those bits in the books are awful, that doesn’t mean children shouldn’t read them. People underestimate that both things can co exist at once, and that children in particular have the ability to put things in context.”
Each of the winners are determined to make writing their career. But do they worry over how financially sustainable such a career is? Weyland Eden speaks for them all when he says he acknowledges the challenge. Yet he also wonders if it needs to be like this. “I’m lucky because I’m able to live with my parents,” he says. “But a lot of the arts feel like this: it seems you are either making a ton of money or you are making no money at all. There is definitely a view in the UK that literature is respected here in a way that is not true in every country. But at the same time, it’s never seen as its own career. It’s seen as something you do on the side of doing another job. It’s a cultural mindset: this sense that the arts are not technically a job but that individuals can make it into one if they try hard enough.”
There’s no doubt that literary prizes help enormously in improving the viability of writing, not just as a valuable objective in its own right but as a worthwhile career pursuit. So who will win? We will have to wait and see but whoever does can expect priceless industry support. Reubens sums up the feelings of all the winners I spoke to. “It was winning this award that made me able to think of myself as a writer,” she says.
The winners of the BBC Young Writers’ Award with Cambridge University and the BBC National Short Story Prize will be announced on October 1 on Front Row from 7.15pm. All the shortlisted stories are available on BBC Sounds. 
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