Wilbur & Niso Smith Foundation – “An Adventure for Everyone”

19th August 2024

The Wilbur & Niso Smith Foundation:

Announcing the 2024 Best Published Novel Award Shortlist

Launched in September 2015, the Wilbur and Niso Smith Foundation is a charitable organisation dedicated to empowering writers, promoting literacy and advancing adventure writing as a genre. We work with readers and writers of all ages and stages, across the world.

The Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize is our flagship programme for published, unpublished and young writers. There are three annual awards within it.

Firstly, we have the Author of Tomorrow award for young writers. Each year we receive hundreds of short adventure stories from young people around the world, aged 21 and under. From those entrants, ten shortlisted young writers have their work professionally edited and digitally published in an anthology. Anthologies from the last few years combined have had over half a million readers.

We also run the New Voice award, for unpublished, aspiring authors. Again, we receive submissions from around the world, and select five writers each year, taking them from a fledgling idea and opening chapters, to a finished first draft of their manuscripts. We then support them in finding a literary agent and for some, a publisher.

Finally, the Best Published Novel award is our Prize for published authors and seeks the best adventure fiction today. Again, the Prize is open to authors of any nationality, anywhere in the world, writing in English. The award is £10,000 for the winning writer, but we aim for the shortlisting and the conversation generated around the books to lead to more sales and more readers for all of the authors on the shortlist.

We specifically look for the titles that are, of course, excellent in one way or another but will also appeal to many different types of readers. What we hope to accomplish is a shortlist that will encompass ‘An Adventure for Everyone.’

The ingredients of a great adventure story are many! An impossible quest, action, romance, insurmountable odds, a pacy plot, danger… A great adventure story often contains all these elements, but the most important thing is the feeling of being on an epic journey, exploring new horizons – be they historical or geographical. We look for books that explore themes of courage, endurance and resourcefulness; books that allow readers to connect with a different reality or culture. And yes, they must be enjoyable – we want books that will keep a reader turning the pages from the very start right through to the last sentence.

Previous winners include The Tears of Dark Water by Corban Addison (2016), Under a Pole Star by Stef Penney (2017), A Necessary Evil by Abir Mukherjee (2018), Firefly by Henry Porter (2019), Miss Benson’s Beetle by Rachel Joyce (2021), Where Blood Runs Cold by Giles Kristian (2022) and No Country for Girls by Emma Styles (2023).

Novels are submitted by agents and publishers, and then read and reviewed by a volunteer panel of librarians and library staff from across the UK. This panel is responsible for selecting the long and shortlists with our ethos at the forefront of their minds.

Once we do have our six, we hand over to the judges. Each year, we invite experts from the literary and adventure worlds to join us. Our wonderful 2024 panel comprises Matt Barr, who is a writer, journalist and host of the Looking Sideways Action Sports podcast; Lee Craigie, who is a former professional mountain bike racer and director of The Adventure Syndicate; Dr Alasdair Harris, a marine conservationist and National Geographic Explorer; Sarah Outen, a record-breaking athlete and therapist; and Emma Styles, author and winner of the 2023 Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize.

You can find out more about the judges, and indeed about the prize and the shortlist on our website.

The winner of the £10,000 award will be revealed on 19th September 2024 at a private reception in London, UK.

WANT TO READ ALONG and see which title you think could be a fitting winner for The Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize? Just click to buy on the links below and get stuck in!

Hard By a Great Forest by Leo Vardiashvili – TBILISI

Tbilisi’s littered with memories that await me like landmines. The dearly departed voices I silenced long ago have come back without my permission. The situation calls for someone with a plan. I didn’t even bring toothpaste.

Saba’s father is missing, and the trail leads back to Tbilisi, Georgia.

It’s been two decades since Irakli fled his war-torn homeland with two young sons, now grown men. Two decades since he saw their mother, who stayed so they could escape. At long last, Tbilisi has lured him home. But when Irakli’s phone calls stop, a mystery begins…

Arriving in the city as escaped zoo animals prowl the streets, Saba picks up the trail of clues: strange graffiti, bewildering messages transmitted through the radio, pages from his father’s unpublished manuscript scattered like breadcrumbs. As the voices of those left behind pull at the edges of his world, Saba will discover that all roads lead back to the past, and to secrets swallowed up by the great forests of Georgia.

Buy Now

The Curse of Pietro Houdini by Derek B Miller – LAZIO

We will lie, cheat, steal, fight, kill, and sin our way to Napoli. We will trust no one but each other, and we will remember that in this place, at this time, there is no way to tell friend from foe.

The bombing of Rome in 1943 leaves fourteen-year-old Massimo orphaned and with no choice but to set out on a perilous journey to find his remaining family in Naples. A chance meeting with the mysterious and charismatic Pietro Houdini will deliver both of them to the doors of the monastery of Monte Cassino, a centuries-old haven of contemplation, learning and art.

But the abbey is in the path of the relentless Allied advance to Rome. Pietro and Massimo need a plan to survive the coming onslaught and that means out-manoeuvring the Germans who are as interested in the abbey’s art collection as in the murder of two of their officers in the town below.
For their plan to work, they must dissemble, disguise, and outwit two armies using skills that Pietro has in spades, but as war edges ever closer, it becomes clear that Massimo is not without a surprise or two either…

Saltblood by Francesca de Torres – CARIBBEAN / NETHERLANDS / PLYMOUTH

In a rented room outside Plymouth in 1685, a daughter is born as her half-brother is dying. Her mother makes a decision: Mary will become Mark, and Ma will continue to collect his inheritance money.

Mary’s dual existence as Mark will lead to a role as a footman in a grand house, serving a French mistress; to the navy, learning who to trust and how to navigate by the stars; and to the army and the battlegrounds of Flanders, finding love among the bloodshed and the mud. But none of this will stop Mary yearning for the sea.

Drawn back to the water, Mary must reinvent herself yet again, for a woman aboard a ship is a dangerous thing. This time Mary will become something more dangerous than a woman.

She will become a pirate.

Breathing life into the Golden Age of Piracy, Saltblood is a wild adventure, a treasure trove, weaving an intoxicating tale of gender and survival, passion and loss, journeys and transformation, through the story of Mary Read, one of history’s most remarkable figures.

Buy Now

Light Over Liskeard by Louis de Bernières – LISKEARD, CORNWALL

Q wants a simpler and safer life. His work as a quantum cryptographer for the government has led him to believe a crisis is imminent for civilisation and he’s looking for somewhere to ride out what’s ahead.

He buys a ruined farmhouse in Cornwall and begins to build his own self-sufficient haven. Over the course of this quest he meets the eccentric characters who already live on the moors nearby – including the park ranger in charge of the reintroduced lynxes and aurochs that roam the area; a holy man waiting for the second coming on top of a nearby hill; an Arthurian knight on horseback and the amorous ghost of an Edwardian woman who haunts the farmhouse.

As life in the cities gets more complicated, and our systems of electronic control begin to fall apart, Q flourishes in the wild Cornish countryside. His new way of life brings him back in tune with his teenage children, his ex-wife, and his own sense of who he is. He also grows close to Eva, energetic and enchanting, who is committed to her own quest for love and meaning.

In this entertaining and heart-warming novel Louis de Bernières makes us reconsider what is really precious in our short and precarious lives.

Buy Now

Our Hideous Progeny by C E McGill – LONDON / SCOTLAND

Mary is the great-niece of Victor Frankenstein. She knows her great uncle disappeared in mysterious circumstances in the Arctic but she doesn’t know why or how…

The 1850s is a time of discovery and London is ablaze with the latest scientific theories and debates, especially when a spectacular new exhibition of dinosaur sculptures opens at the Crystal Palace. Mary, with a sharp mind and a sharper tongue, is keen to make her name in this world of science, alongside her geologist husband Henry, but without wealth and connections, their options are limited.

But when Mary discovers some old family papers that allude to the shocking truth behind her great-uncle’s past, she thinks she may have found the key to securing their future… Their quest takes them to the wilds of Scotland, to Henry’s intriguing but reclusive sister Maisie, and to a deadly chase with a rival who is out to steal their secret…

Buy Now

Blessings by Chukwuebuka Ibeh – NIGERIA

‘Chukwuebuka Ibeh’s writing has a certain delicacy to it, so wonderfully observant, and so beautiful’ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

When Obiefuna’s father witnesses an intimate moment between his teenage son and the family’s apprentice, newly arrived from the nearby village, he banishes Obiefuna to a Christian boarding school marked by strict hierarchy and routine, devastating violence. Utterly alienated from the people he loves, Obiefuna begins a journey of self-discovery and blossoming desire, while his mother Uzoamaka grapples to hold onto her favourite son, her truest friend.

Interweaving the perspectives of Obiefuna and his mother Uzoamaka, as they reach towards a future that will hold them both, BLESSINGS is an elegant and exquisitely moving story of love and loneliness. Asking how we can live freely when politics reaches into our hearts and lives, as well as deep into our consciousness, it is a stunning, searing debut.

Buy Now

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