We are delighted to share the Welcome speech from our 2026 London Writers Awards Literary Fiction Judge – Ashani Lewis, delivered on Saturday 21st Febuary 2026.

A huge thank you to Ashani for your powerful words that will no doubt inspire the cohort on their 10 month journey!

“Hello. I’m so happy to be here this morning, and to be able to say a few words to all of you before you start a program that I enjoyed so much back in 2021. Before anything, I want to say a huge congratulations. The LWA cohorts have always had such a high level of talent and commitment, and I’ve seen the alumni from before, after, and during my year at the program make such amazing work. And, because I was lucky enough to be a literary fiction judge for 2026, I’ve read and loved work by a fair few of you, so I know that this year, and this room, is full of real excellence.

Bobby’s asked me to give a little bit of my biography, before and after publication. My path to getting agented and then published was a real case of trial and error, and in the end LWA was a catalyst for progress, as I hope it will be for you. I do think one of the things about this program that makes it stand out from a lot of writing courses – and something you will obviously be aware of – is how much it helps, practically, with the professional side, as well as the hazier quandaries of plot and style.

I’ve always written a lot. I wrote my first novel when I was fourteen. Very long, possibly the best researched of anything I’ve ever written, very purple. I didn’t have any real idea how the system worked – if I recall correctly, I sent it straight off as an email attachment to Penguin, who were kind enough to send a serious, though standard, rejection letter. I finished my second novel when I was seventeen. It was an exorcism of a lot of things that were happening to me at the time, and it reads like a real vortex of teenage angst. I sent that one to a few agents, and again, was roundly rejected, though a few of the rejection letters were slightly more personal. I treasured – and still treasure – one letter that says ‘There’s some good stuff in this.’ I wrote another at university, which was a classic campus novel, a little bit Secret History, but with more ketamine and dry herb vapes. A while after graduation, I sent that one to every single literary agency in London, and one agent replied asking for a call. On the call, he said that this novel wasn’t there yet, but to get back in touch if I wrote anything else.

Until recently, I’ve had the bad habit of dismissing these three early novels. In conversations with friends, in interviews and on podcasts, I’ve laughed at how florid or angsty or derivative those first tries were, and at my silliness in submitting them, one after the other. But that’s a mistake. Every one of those novels was better than the one before, and even the first one taught me something amazing – that I could finish writing a book.

Many of you here over this next year with LWA will finish the projects that you’ve brought to the program. Some of you are already at a redrafting stage. When that happens, take a moment to sit in how good it feels. There is no writing that is wasted. Every sentence you write trains your ear. Anything you’ve already written is part of the reason you’re here. There is always ‘some good stuff in this.’

By the time I did the LWA course in 2021, I’d had a few smaller pieces of writing out. Stories in Bad Form and Joyland, and I’d won a couple of writing competitions. When Bobby released the first cohort announcement – yours, I think, went out on Wednesday – it made an immediate difference. Over the next months, a few agents reached out to me offering representation,  and I ended up signing with the one who’d offered me encouragement more than a year earlier, on the phone call about my campus novel.

My first published novel, Winter Animals, came out in February 2024, and my short fiction collection Everest came out the same year. My next novel, Suckerfish, is actually coming out a week today. It’s a testament to this program, and to my wonderful LWA feedback group that Suckerfish feels as much a product of what I learned on this course as Winter Animals did, even though I wrote it more recently. Because of the nature of the LWA course – developing writers from underrepresented communities – a lot of the writing, the workshops, and the resulting manuscripts deal with autofiction, and questions of identity and representation, which are much more at the forefront of Suckerfish than of my other work. I still feel like LWA helped give me a kind of permission to think about those questions without feeling trite, or underqualified.

That’s the biography out of the way. Bobby’s suggestion was that I follow up  with some advice. The thing is, the fact that you are all in this room – and, actually, what I’ve seen of your applications – means that you’re already in the know about the most serious advice I could give you, which is to apply for as many things as possible.

Always be applying for things. Grants, competitions, courses, retreats. It prepares you for rejection and it lines you up for validation. It helps you connect with other writers and it can be genuinely financially valuable. It also works exponentially – the more opportunities you involve yourself in, the more opportunities will approach you. Get the Writers’ & Artists’ Yearbook. Get on mailing lists. Sign up to the Fieldnotes newsletter, which has a fantastic monthly compilation of open calls, and is anyway a very lovely publishing project.

That’s my driest, most careerist advice. Otherwise, the writing advice to which I subscribe is more of a series of rituals or mantras, some of which address productivity, some block, and some artistic practice. I believe in morning pages, where you write without stopping and without editing until you’ve finished three sides, no exceptions, and then you discard the pages without reading them – a way to get the second-guessing beast off your shoulder. I believe in taking walks to replenish what Julia Cameron calls your ‘image well’, and then coming back to your desk charged with the symbol of a cormorant eating a fish too big for it. I believe in writing every idea down – you won’t remember it in the morning. I believe that if you’re getting stuck writing prose you should try reading poetry. I like to have sentences that I can return to that work on me like ritual or prayer: every time I read the beginning of Under Milk Wood, I remember the devotion that a sentence at maximum potential can inspire.

I think the advice you follow can be varied, contradictory, serious or silly. Make sure you write for at least fifteen minutes a day. Before you edit a draft, change the font so it reads like someone else’s writing. Make sure you write for at least seventeen minutes a day. Wear rings on every finger so that typing makes a sound. Make sure you write for at least twenty minutes a day, and so on. It’s nice to write according to different guidelines; to remember that writing is not one thing; and more, to remember that since forever, writers have been trying to make sense of how to write.

I have an album full of screenshots of advice from or about other writers.

Joan Didion, on having to start making compromises ten pages into writing every book, says ‘Well, it’s not the ideal, it’s not the perfect object I wanted to make, but maybe – if I go ahead and finish it anyway – I can get it right next time.’

Philip Roth’s success is deconstructed into a perfect formula: ‘Never marry; have no children; lawyer up early; keep tight control of your cover designs; listen to the critics while scorning them publicly … sell out your friends, sell out your family, sell out your lovers, and sell out yourself; keep going until every younger writer can be called your imitator; don’t stop until all your enemies are dead.’

Rust Hills at Esquire quotes another editor who says ‘the ideal structure for a short story is just somebody walking down Fifth Avenue. Anything can happen while you’re walking down Fifth Avenue. You get a call from your ex-wife, you see a guy get killed, but you’re still always walking down Fifth Avenue, from 50^th to 45^th. There’s that kind of thing moving it through.’

I keep this album and every other week I think – oh, this is the thing that will make my writing better, or solve this problem. I love all of the methods that people have used to optimise or analyse a process that is in many ways a wild animal, sensual and intangible, futile and meaningful. I think it’s so hopeful.

That hope – the hope of getting better at writing – will follow you for as long as you do this. It’s why you’re here. I wish you all the best on this program and I am so excited to see what you come up with.”