The Alpine Fellowship Writing Prize 2025

APPLICATIONS OPEN 1ST JANUARY 2025.

Awarded for the best piece of writing on the theme, which will be announced soon.

Prizes:

The winner and runners-up will receive cash prizes and will be invited to attend our annual symposium. We will offer up to £500 travel expenses to help with travel to the event and meals and accommodation during the symposium dates are also covered.

First place: £3,000

Second place: £1,000

Third place: £1,000

Rules:

All genres of writing are permitted, including fiction, non-fiction, and non-academic essays.
Open to all nationalities.
Applicants must be aged 18 or above at the time of entry.
All entries must be written in English.
Limited to one entry per person.
Submissions must be standalone and cannot be extracted from a larger piece.
A maximum of 1,000 words per entry.
Stories must not have been published (not including self-published), or accepted for publication in print or online, or have won or been placed in another competition at any time.
Travel expenses can be used for economy travel costs only and are not exchangeable for cash, any leftover travel budget will not be redeemed as cash.
Travel expenses can be used for transport only, and can not be used towards accommodation outside of the dates of our symposium.
Submissions will be judged anonymously, so please ensure that your name does not appear anywhere on your work.
Due to the volume of applications, the judge’s decisions are final and no correspondence will be entered into following the results.
The use of generative writing programmes or artificial intelligence (for example, ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude) is strictly prohibited.

Key dates:

Applications open: 1st January 2025
Applications close: 1st March 2025 at 23:59 (UK time)

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*Please note: we reserve the right to change any aspect of our prizes at any point during the submission or judging process or to not award a prize if we choose.

Alpine Fellowship Writing Prize 2023

2024 - On Language

Mary Murray Bartolomé - Winner

**Mary Murray Bartolomé** is a Scottish writer, teacher, and adventurer. She lives in a small town outside Barcelona with her husband and border collie Neu. Her short stories have been published online and listed in prizes such as the Bath Short Story Prize, the Bridport Prize, and the Chipping Norton Literary Award.
Her debut novel was longlisted in the Bath Novel Award and the London Library scholarship. She is an alumni of the Faber Writing A Novel course and recently won a place on the New Writing North Academy's short story course.
She is currently working on her second novel, a short story collection, and seeking representation. More of her writing can be found on her blog.

Tiffany Ong - Runner Up

**Tiffany Ong** has a Master’s Degree in Creative Writing from Royal Holloway, where she graduated with distinction.
She is an alumna of the Tin House Winter Workshop and was selected as one of the finalists for David Higham Associates Open Week for Under-represented Writers.
She is intrigued by stories told in parallel or multiple narratives as this is a true reflection of the world we live in, where everyone is multidimensional, and every voice deserves to be heard. One of her short stories can be found in Quarterly Literary Review Singapore.

Joanna Hong - Runner up

**Joanna Hong** is a writer and translator from Los Angeles and the daughter of Korean immigrants.
In 2021, she was a PEN America Emerging Voices Fellow in Fiction and received support from Poets & Writers and The Readership through their Open Door Career Advancement Grant.
In 2023, her fiction was shortlisted for the Alpine Fellowship Writing Prize and she was a finalist for the LANDO grant from The de Groot Foundation. She is currently represented by Melissa Danaczko at Stuart Krichevsky Literary Agency. She has a BA from Pitzer College in European Studies and Italian, and an MA from University College London in Human Rights.
Her work in journalism and translation has been published in The New York Times, The Guardian, Dazed & Confused and other outlets.

Honourable Mentions: Alice Malseed and Kyla Walker

To read the winning stories, please click the links below:

Campfire Meditations by Mary Murray Bartolomé

reverie by joanna hong

Insomnia by tiffany ong

Previous winners

2023 - On Flourishing

Laura Theis - Winner

Laura Theis writes in her second language. Her work has been widely anthologized and appears in *Poetry, Magma, Asimov’s, Mslexia, Rattle, Strange Horizons, the Caterpillar* and elsewhere. Her Elgin Award-nominated debut, *how to extricate yourself,* an Oxford Poetry Library Book of the Month, won the Brian Dempsey Memorial Prize. Her follow-up, *A Spotter’s Guide to Invisible Things,* won the Live Canon Collection Prize and received the Society of Authors’ Arthur Welton Award. Her third collection is forthcoming with Broken Sleep Books in early 2025.
Recent accolades include the Alpine Fellowship, Oxford Brookes Poetry Prize, Poets and Players Prize, AM Heath Prize, and the Mogford Short Story Prize judged by Stephen Fry and Prue Leith. She was nominated for the Forward Prize and a finalist for the BBC Short Story Prize, the Women Poets' Prize, the Bridport Prize and the National Poetry Competition.

Judith O’Reilly - Winner

Judith O’Reilly is the author of three page-turning action thrillers. Her latest book *Sleep When You’re Dead* (set on a remote Scottish island and featuring a sinister Doomsday cult and shady US defence contractors) was a *Financial Times'* Best Book of 2022.
Her zeitgeisty novels (under the pen name Jude O'Reilly) are based around the adventures of action hero and ex-assassin, Michael North, who has a bullet in his head. A bullet which means he could die at any second. A situation which means he intends to make every second of the life that he has left count.
Judith has also written two memoirs, *Wife in the North* and *A Year of Doing Good*.

Pooja Poudel - Runner-up

Based in Kathmandu, Pooja Poudel is invested in storytelling, short story writing and the arts. Her stories often include narratives borrowed from memories, realisations and observations that are centred around the experiences of women. She was awarded the first prize in Writing Nepal 2021: A Short Story Contest.