Following up on the shortlist news I shared in November: Ali Smith has chosen two winners for the second annual Weatherglass Novella Prize. Both of these have changed title since they were submitted as manuscripts (From the Smallest Things to The Hyena’s Daughter; Shougani to Pink Soap). I’m particularly interested in Jones’s novel about Mary Shelley and her sister and stepsister. And the Gaston has a brilliant cover!

Here’s what Ali Smith had to say about the winning books, courtesy of the Weatherglass Substack:

The Hyena’s Daughter by Jupiter Jones

(to be published in April 2026)

“This novella tells the far-too-untold story of a c19th sisterhood, that of the daughters of Mary Wollstonecraft: Fanny Imlay and Mary Shelley, the famed writer of Frankenstein, plus their step[-]sister Claire Clairmont. Are they the three graces? The fates? They’re women, as alive and breathing and rebellious and analytical as you and me, and well aware and critical of the hemmed-in nature they’re expected to accept as women of their time, a time of ‘a new way of thinking, a new-world independence, a revolutionary world.’

“It features their connection to Percy Bysshe Shelley – ‘how could we not love him, with his lofty ethics and words that flew like birds?’ – and many of the other contemporary poets and thinkers of the time. Pacy and assured, it turns its history to life from fragment to sensuous fragment. If the dead brought to life is to be Mary Shelley’s theme, this novella asks what the real source of life spirit is, the vital spark. This novella, full of detail and richesse, is a piece of vitality in itself.”

Pink Soap by Anju Gaston

(to be published in June 2026)

“‘I ask the internet the difference between something being too close to the bone and something being too close to home.’ This funny and terrifying book is a study of what and how things mean, and don’t, in our latest machine age. In it something unforgivable has happened. The main character in this novella, seemingly numbed but bristling with blade-sharp understanding, is only just holding things together and trying to work out how to heal. So she travels to Japan in a search for the other half of a fragmented family. Or is it the world itself that has fragmented?

“Pink Soap examines the massive everyday pressures we’re all under with real wit and style. It is pristine, brilliant, smart beyond belief. I sense it becoming as much a classic for now as Plath’s The Bell Jar has been for the decades behind us.”

Submissions have already opened for the 2027 Prize. More information is here.