Future Worlds Prize 2026: Ty Ogunade Wins with Cyberpunk Novel

Ty Ogunade has won the 2026 Future Worlds Prize for Fantasy and Science Fiction Writers of Colour, with his cyberpunk novel A Blade Drawn from Envy. The winner was announced this evening at a ceremony in London, hosted by Gollancz.

The Future Worlds Prize is now in its sixth year, and if you haven't come across it before, it's one of the more exciting things happening in UK genre fiction right now. Founded by Ben Aaronovitch (of Rivers of London fame) in 2020 and financially supported by both Aaronovitch and Bridgerton actor Adjoa Andoh. Its purpose is straightforward: find new SFF talent based in the UK. The prize was previously known as the Gollancz and Rivers of London BAME SFF Award, but has since been rebranded and is now administered by Future Worlds Prize CIC, a not-for-profit organisation.

Ogunade is the founder of the London Sci-Fi & Fantasy Authors writers group, and A Blade Drawn from Envy sounds like it occupies exactly the kind of territory that cyberpunk has always done best: the collision between corporate power and the people it chews through. The novel follows Elias De Leon, heir to the world's most powerful augmentation dynasty, who is dying of augmentation rejection. Desperate for a remedy, he seeks out Tobi Ezeoke, an illegally augmented biohacker drowning in debt to a black market syndicate. What begins as a transaction becomes something more complicated after Elias defies his own family to save Tobi's sister from the cybernetically enhanced elite. The judges described the book as "a fresh and new story" with pacy writing, and noted that it pulled them in quickly.

I haven't read it (I have had quite enough on my plate this year, as it happens), but the premise alone suggests the kind of novel that earns its genre rather than just wearing it.

The runner-up is Jessica Tsang, a speculative writer and poet originally from Hong Kong and now based in London, with There Will Come Soft Rains. This one has a worldbuilding hook that I find genuinely arresting: two cities, one skybound and aqueous, the other drought-ridden and landlocked, embroiled in a decades-long cold war. The only water source for the lower city, Tem-Dri, comes from "crying rains", a weather phenomenon in which citizens of the upper city, Azom, are inexplicably and painfully transformed into rain. That is a premise. The judges said the world was "really well realised" and that they "disappeared into the story", which tracks; you don't build something that strange unless you intend to make it feel lived in.

The winner receives £4,500, the runner-up £2,500, and each of the remaining six shortlisted writers receives £850. All eight also get mentoring from one of the prize's publishing partners, a list that reads like a who's who of UK genre imprints: Bloomsbury, Del Rey, Daphne Press, Gollancz, HarperVoyager, Hodderscape, Orbit, Penguin Michael Joseph, Titan and Tor. That mentoring, frankly, might be worth more than the cash in the long run.

The six other shortlisted works are:

• A Corruption of Death by Hadiyah Sama
• A Song of Shir'ja by Harps Aujla
• Crooked Straits by Olivia Ho
• One Thousand and One Wishes by Rakan Khashman
• The Sun Wells by Aiden Ng
• Zonbi by Zarah Elouis-Ro

This year's judging panel comprised Carolynn Bain (founder of Afrori Books), Ese Erheriene (winner of the 2024 Future Worlds Prize), Eric Huang (deputy programme director for Creative Writing and Publishing at City, University of London), Nahrein Kemp (DEI and talent lead at ITV), and Chris Pak (lecturer at Swansea University and vice president of the Science Fiction Research Association).

Prizes like this matter. The SFF shelves in this country are broader and stranger and better than they were ten years ago, and that didn't happen by accident. It happened because people like Aaronovitch and Andoh put their money where their enthusiasm is, and because organisations like Future Worlds gave emerging writers a route in that didn't depend on already knowing the right people. Eight more writers now have that route. I look forward to seeing where it takes them.

More information on the prize and shortlisted entries can be found at futureworldsprize.co.uk.