Jacqueline Crooks and Vanessa Londoño have been named the 2026 recipients of the Eccles Institute and Hay Festival Global Writer’s Award. The announcement was made Monday evening at

a reception in the British Library.

Each author will receive £20,000 and up to a year-long writing residency at the Library, where they will draw on its extensive Americas collections to develop their forthcoming books. Their completed works will later be showcased at Hay Festival events in the UK and Latin America.

Selected from a shortlist of six emerging writers from Europe and the Americas, the winners impressed judges with proposals spanning fiction and non-fiction. This year’s shortlist reflected a wide thematic range—from diasporic identity and Caribbean family histories to Indigenous mythologies and questions of gender and race.

Now in its 15th year, the Writer’s Award supports two writers annually who are at the early stages of a book project connected to the Americas. Alongside financial support and residency time, winners gain the opportunity to work closely with the Eccles Institute and present their work at future Hay Festival editions.

This year’s judging panel included Catherine Eccles, Polly Russell, Cristina Fuentes La Roche, Colin Grant, and Mercedes Aguirre.

Polly Russell, Head of the Eccles Institute for the Americas and Oceania, praised the selected projects: “Both submissions explore important aspects of Caribbean and South American Indigenous cultures and histories. We look forward to welcoming them to the Library next year and supporting their research.”

Cristina Fuentes La Roche, International Director of Hay Festival, added: “Our winners offer contrasting perspectives on the Americas that both celebrate and interrogate the continents. It’s an honour to support their work through this platform.”

Submissions for the 2027 Writer’s Award will open next summer. Photo by Christine Matthews / British Library, London WC1 / CC BY-SA 2.0, Wikimedia commons.