We are excited to announce that we have a clear winner for the Pitch Prize Readers’ Choice vote!
Many congratulations to Emily Roe who won the vote with the opening of The Stym, a dystopian novel. BPA will award Emily a short report on her opening 10,000 words.
Well done to all seven finalists. Making the final selection out of more than 550 entries is a huge achievement. The seven winners will have a one-to-one with literary agent Katie Greenstreet, during which they will have the chance to pitch their novel and receive expert editorial feedback, recommendations, industry insights and, finally, advice on next steps.
Thank you to all who voted in the Pitch Prize Readers’ Choice. Submissions for the 2025 First Novel Award will open in January and we can’t wait to read your entries. Until then, we wish you all joyous end-of-year festivities!
Read the winning pitch:
The Stym
Monday, November 2, 2037, Hammersmith
Cerin
Cerin slid into the Stym at her usual time, head bowed and hooded, eyes determinedly diverted from the chanting purple blaze of Bin the Stym protestors.
It was Monday morning rush hour and circular rows of sound-proofed glass cubicles flashed the red occupied sign. The glass of each pod clouded up on closure. But in the early morning light, Cerin could make out solitary shadows in some pods, human silhouettes rocking silently and mechanically. She turned right, as she always did, tiptoeing past the outer row and keeping her hood up to shroud her face, although nobody in the pods could see or hear her. This was her regular 7.30am half-hour slot before crossing the road to work, a routine dating back to the stym’s opening 12 months ago. She’d visited it out of journalistic curiosity at first, telling herself to lie back and think of the citizenship points. But she’d gradually got sucked into the ease of it, the brief escapist pleasure it gave, the release from everything outside. And more importantly, it became a refuge from thoughts of Jack; a place that fed the part of her that was vulnerable to him. A place where nobody real could hurt her. She had stayed with pod 184 out of habit: its position made it one of the quickest to slip into. Its glass doors bleeped and flashed green in recognition as she approached.
“Good morning, Cerin!” trilled the ubiquitous female voice.
“Good morning!” Cerin mumbled in greeting.
The door remained closed.
“Sorry, I did not understand that,” chirped the voice, with the note of concern which irritated Cerin each morning.
“For fuck’s sake,” Cerin heard herself breathe, hearing a warning bleep from her eye-phone. Another citizenship point gone.
“Good morning,” she repeated, as emphatically and cheerily as she could. The pod accepted her now. Its doors slid open.
Pod 184 was the same as always. A plastic reclining chair, like an old-fashioned dentist’s chair, was its centrepiece. Cerin watched the curved glass walls around her cloud over, encircling her in a misty shroud, dissolving from sight the row of identical apparatus inside the next three empty pods. She undressed, placed her eye-phone inside the armrest sensor, pulled on the headset and slid her arms inside the shackles. They clamped shut, holding her firm.
“The usual, please,” was all she had to say.
Cerin’s ‘usual’ had never changed and it had become such a fixed part of her life that it had started entering her dreams. She was tilted back and the bottom half of the chair split apart, dividing her legs. A man’s face hovered over hers. It was always the same face; Toby’s. She had programmed him not to speak. Instead, she had chosen music from a band called Air, from her parent’s generation, to sound in her ears. It helped her escape, made her think of the gentler, freer world of the last century, which her parents often spoke of nostalgically.
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