Winner(s) of the Queen Mary Small Press Fiction Prize 2026
And it's a tie!
In an exciting twist, there are joint overall winners for this year’s Queen Mary Small Press Fiction Prize: Ghost Driver by Nell Osborne from Moist Books and Figures Crossing the Field Towards the Group by Rebecca Gransden from Tangerine Press.
The winners were announced at a two-part event held on March 25th at Queen Mary University, London, following a panel with the five shortlistees, the prize judges and the director of the Republic of Consciousness Foundation, Neil Griffiths. Keep an eye out for recordings of both the panel and the announcement.
The five shortlistees have already split half the prize pot between them (the other half being split between all ten longlistees). What makes our prize unique is that 70% of each portion of the prize goes to the press and 30% to the author—part of our way to support all those who make the best of small press fiction happen in the UK and the Republic of Ireland. And now the joint winners will share the glory as well as a five-day writer’s residency for their authors thanks to our partners at the Hawkwood Centre for Future Thinking.
Read on below to find out why our brilliant judges thought both these presses and books deserved to share the Queen Mary Small Press Fiction Prize in 2026.
Ghost Driver by Nell Osborne from Moist Books
Our prize judge Marina Benjamin writes:
Stylishly written and darkly funny, Nell Osborne’s novel is a nightmarish vision of alienation and anomie, of unsatisfactory situationships and working lives defined by phoney goals and empty rituals. It brings administrative noir into the orbit of body horror—as if Ottessa Moshfegh had written severance. Moist Books celebrates writing ‘at the fringes’ with work that amplifies unease, even disgust with the present, and ghost driver is the perfect mascot for this ambition.
Judge Susanna Crossman writes:
Ghost Driver by Nell Osborne is a brilliant vital eerie exploration of Malory and the horror of her (and our) contemporary lives. In this novel, Nell Osborne smartly channels Freud’s uncanny, the familiar becomes unfamiliar as Malory navigates with creeping horror: office politics, body dysmorphia, drunk nights, relationships and a giant fly. Published by moist books, this funny, dark and highly intelligent book encapsulates their mission statement to champion literature emerging from unease, books written on ‘the fringe’.
And judge Stu Hennigan writes:
Ghost Driver by Nell Osborne is a shape-shifting gem powered by an effortlessly hip voice that crackles with restless energy. Its boundary-blurring blending of the personal with the political, and the uncanny with the mundane, is as beguiling and fresh as modern fiction gets. This refusal of easy categorisation, one of the novel’s most appealing characteristics, is entirely in synch with the ethos of its publisher, for whom clear distinctions between styles, forms and genres are simply barriers there to be broken.
Figures Crossing the Field Towards the Group by Rebecca Gransden from Tangerine Press
Our prize judge Marina Benjamin writes:
Rebecca Gransden has written a post-apocalyptic novel of quiet unease, the end of things coming like a thief in the night—except the night is red-hued, grainy, blurred, the landscape blasted and littered with dead and dying bodies. There is a sense of time having stopped. Even language is disintegrating, which Gransden’s poetic genius captures in heart-stoppingly affecting monosyllabic prose. Once read this book won’t be forgotten. Tangerine Press is unique, artisanal, visionary, uncompromising.
Judge Susanna Crossman writes:
A mesmerising dystopian novel, Figures Crossing the Field Towards the Group by Rebecca Gransden is a reading experience. We tumble into this book, as though the writing itself were a broken landscape that we enter, seized. Through breath-taking prose, we travel on a seismic journey with a young woman through a society demolished, where bodies rot, and geology has erupted, dissolved. This year Tangerine Press celebrate two decades of publishing ‘misfits, mavericks and misanthropes’ producing beautiful handmade often limited-edition books. Gransden’s glorious text, in its second print run, is another jewel in their crafted collection.
And judge Stu Hennigan writes:
Figures Crossing the Field Towards the Group by Rebecca Gransden is a work of breathtaking originality in form, style and execution. Gransden’s startling stylistic innovations create a language that’s familiar and alien in equal measure, a soon-to-come Newspeak stripped back to the bare bones that simultaneously recalls the alliterative poetry of the Anglo-Saxons. Perennial mavericks Tangerine Press have been quietly publishing writing and writers from the margins for the last two decades in formats that are often works of art in themselves; Gransden’s text, with its ancient memories of a mythic future, is another gem to add to their hugely impressive collection.
If you’re thrilled as we are for these books and you like what we do here at the Republic of Consciousness Foundation, then you can join in via our Book of the Month Subscription scheme. Not only do you pay to receive in the post a specially selected small press fiction title every month or other month, but that money goes into the prize pot for the Queen Mary Small Press Fiction Prize. So to find even more marvellous books like Ghost Driver and Figures Crossing the Field Towards the Group get a subscription for yourself or a loved one in time for the 2027 prize. Until then, happy reading, and one last congratulations to our winners!
