Young Persons Writing Award Winners

The new University of Wolverhampton publishing venture, Ripple Bed Press, is excited to announce its new annual writing competition for school pupils in the West Midlands. We’ve teamed up with Wolverhampton Literature Festival and the City of Wolverhampton Libraries for our inaugural writing prize.

The 2026 writing competition theme is Reading Places. We wanted young people to think about writing that explores landscape, important places, wayfinding or regional identity. To imagine the future of a town, city or the Earth itself.

We’re thrilled now to announce the 2026 longlist, shortlist and winners of this year’s prize:

Longlist

Forsaken, Deziah Campbell

Bedridden, Rowan Finlayson-Palmer

Moving Day, Lucas Adams

Reading Places, Pheobe Carr

Spaces, Samaira Mahajan

The Game We Play, Issac Ellis

World, Huai Shui Yuanxiang

A Forest Trapped in Ink, Zara Waqas

Shortlist

A Galaxy of Ink and Soul, Testimony Oluwajomiloju Olatunde-Eso

A Place that Moves, Olivia Oduro-Boadu

Diamond, Rishmeet Kaur

Reading Places, Tiani Thorpe

Winners

The Unreliable Reading Place, Olivia Oduro-Boadu

Where Memory Grows, Aairah Sadeer

These writers will be published in the Reading Places Anthology with Ripple Bed Press, invited to read their work at the launch event, and will receive copies of the book and literary prizes.

STAY TUNED FOR THE 2027 YOUNG PERSON’S WRITING COMPETITION

Ripple Bed Press is an innovative publishing house which seeks, supports and commissions new writing that explores the key themes of place-making, wayfinding and regional identity through innovative approaches to poetry, fiction and essay.

Our name is taken from one of the Black Country’s most prominent geological wonders: The Wren’s Nest Ripple Beds. This famous site within the UNESCO Black Country Geopark is a limestone outcrop where the tropical Silurian Ocean currents are fossilised into the cold, grey matter of the earth. We take this as a figurative expression of how being and landscape converge and as a way of thinking through the ineffable qualities of the creative process. Creative writing follows similar geological processes. The writer agitates situation, memory and experience and seeks to actualise a form built from multifaceted elements. New literature is harnessed to the past through tradition and convention, but also pushes into to new lands and produces new paradigms. It is, like the Ripple Beds, concerned with friction and flow, past-present-future, the capturing and shaping of tricky territories.