Congratulations to our 2021 winner, Jacaranda Books for Lote by Shola von Reinhold, announced on 19th May 2021.

The shortlist was announced in partnership with Bookshop.org on 25th March 2021. The longlist was announced on the 4th of February.In 2021, £20,000 has been distributed between ten small presses: £3,000 to the five shortlisted books, and £1,000 to five longlisted books.

The prize fund is largely donated from two sources: the University of East Anglia, through the UEA Publishing Project; and The Granta Trust. We are immensely grateful for their support. The rest of the prize money is raised through donations and through our small press book club. Thank you to everyone who has given us money and books over the last year.

The prize would not be possible without the support of Arts Council England. We thank them for their continuing support: not only of us, but also the many small publishing projects they fund and encourage.

Winner 2021: Jacaranda Books, for Lote by Shola von Reinhold

Jacaranda Books is an award-winning independent publisher of award-winning adult fiction, non-fiction & YA. They are committed to publishing ground-breaking writing with a dedication to creating space on the bookshelf for diverse ideas and writers.

Shola von Reinhold is a Scottish socialite and writer. Shola has been published in the Cambridge Literary Review, The Stockholm Review, was Cove Park’s Scottish Emerging Writer 2018 and recently won a Dewar Award for Literature.

‘LOTE offers rapturous encounters with dynamics of art, history, and desire — all written with wit, pomp and dazzling style. A joy.’  Eley Williams

‘LOTE is a dazzling novel, an audacious contribution to the current cultural moment that gleams with original ideas and scholarship; it somehow manages to keep the reader gripped while creating the space for us to stand back and gasp at the wit, beauty and mischief Shola von Reinhold has brocaded into the story.’ John Mitchinson

 ‘At once a seriously funny novel rich with intrigue and suspense, it is also an indictment and a powerful decolonial response to historical and contemporary attempts to curate art and art history within the calcified mould of European conservatism.’ Guy Gunaratne

Guy Gunaratne

is a novelist living between the UK and Sweden. Their first novel In Our Mad and Furious City was the winner of the International Dylan Thomas Prize, the Jhalak Prize as well as the Authors Club Best First Novel Award in 2019. It was also longlisted for the Booker Prize as well as the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction and shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize, Gordon Burn Prize and Writers Guild Awards in 2018. In 2019 Guy was appointed Fellow Commoner in the Creative Arts at Trinity College, Cambridge.

John Mitchinson 

is a writer, publisher and podcaster. He is the co-founder of Unbound, the world’s leading crowdfunding platform for books and co-host of the books podcast Backlisted (@BacklistedPod). For ten years he was the Director of Research for the BBC TV show QI and co-wrote the best-selling series  of QI books. Before that he was managing director of The Harvill Press and Cassell & Co and was the original marketing director of Waterstone’s. He has been a Vice-President of the Hay Festival for twenty years.

Eley Williams

lectures at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her short story collection Attrib. and other stories (Influx Press, 2017) won the James Tait Black Prize and Republic of Consciousness Prize. The Liar's Dictionary is her debut novel.