Announcing the Discoveries Prize winner & scholar 2025
BY Discoveries
29th May 2025
Curtis Brown Creative and the Curtis Brown literary agency are proud to partner with the Women’s Prize Trust and Audible to run Discoveries for a fifth year.
The 2025 judging panel was chaired by Kate Mosse CBE, international bestselling novelist and Founder Director of the Women’s Prize, she was joined by an esteemed panel: acclaimed authors Dreda Say Mitchell MBE, Chloe Timms and Claire Kohda, Curtis Brown literary agent Jess Molloy and Curtis Brown Creative’s Founder and Managing Director Anna Davis.
We're excited to reveal this year's winner and scholar, chosen from over 2,600 women who submitted the openings of their unpublished novels-in-progress to Discoveries 2025.
The winner of the prize is Rosie Rowell, with her atmospheric thriller Down by the Stryth. Exploring dysfunctional family relationships, generational trauma and the complexities of womanhood, her novel-in-progress follows the ramifications of a teenage girl’s disappearance. As the winner of Discoveries 2025, Rosie receives an offer of representation by Curtis Brown (she has signed with Jess Molloy, Curtis Brown literary agent and Discoveries 2025 judge), a cash prize of £5,000 and a place on a Curtis Brown Creative six-week online course. In July, she will also join CBC’s specially designed two-week Discoveries Writing Development course alongside the other 15 writers longlisted for Discoveries 2025.
Additionally, Jac Felipez has been named this year’s Discoveries Scholar, winning a place on CBC’s flagship three-month Writing Your Novel course (worth £1,900) to further develop her work-in-progress. A Long Ways from Home is a turbulent crime novel set in London; a story of the abduction of a politician, fuelled by a hidden past of radical activism and radical art.
- Kate Mosse, Chair of Judges, said: 'I'm delighted to say that the process of choosing the winner and scholar for our 2025 Discoveries was tough, reminding us yet again of what a huge range of diverse and brilliant female talent is out there. I've no doubt that all the authors longlisted and shortlisted have a great writing future ahead of them. Rosie’s novel-in-progress is atmospheric, beautifully structured and puts the painful struggles of contemporary teenage girlhood vividly on the page. Jac’s developing novel is bold, intense, glitters with nuance and politics, and offers fascinating insights into black artists from the 1980s whose works are only now being ‘discovered’. A huge thank you and my admiration to my fellow judges for their enthusiasm, rigor, integrity and great company, and I can't wait to see each of the novels find their way out into the world for readers to discover.'
- Anna Davis, Curtis Brown Creative, and Jess Molloy, Curtis Brown, said: ‘We are thrilled to celebrate this year’s winner and scholar, Rosie Rowell and Jac Felipez – two novels-in-progress that are compelling and exciting, and which also – in their very different ways – explore serious and disturbing issues within families and in British society. We feel proud to continue to partner with the Women’s Prize Trust and Audible in this award and writing development programme, which is entirely free to enter. Working on Discoveries for the last five years has already given us the opportunity to read and work with some truly talented women writers, and we are excited to launch again in September and see what year six may bring.’
We can't wait for these writers to follow in the footsteps of the growing community of female novelists who first achieved recognition through Discoveries. Now in its fifth year, 15% of the writers listed in the first four years of Discoveries have gone on to secure publishing deals for their debut novels so far, including Emma van Straaten, the inaugural winner, who published her novel This Immaculate Body (Little, Brown) earlier this year to critical acclaim.
Please find our interviews with Discoveries 2025 winner and scholar below.
Winner Interview
Rosie Rowell, Down by the Stryth
Rosie is an opera singer and singing teacher from London. She studied her undergraduate degree in English Literature at Durham University and then went on to train at the opera school at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama. In her free time, Rosie is obsessed with pole dance, and is a two-time finalist at the Great British Pole Championships. Her novel Down by the Stryth is a thriller about the violence and terror of teenage girlhood, combining the small-town secrets of Anna Bailey’s Tall Bones with the family tragedy of Celeste Ng’s Everything I Never Told You.
- How does it feel to be named the Discoveries 2025 winner? Winning Discoveries has felt surreal and extraordinary. Like most writers, I’ve spent a long time sitting in my own thoughts, writing whenever I’ve got a free moment (mostly on the sofa in my pyjamas) and struggling to find the courage to put my work out into the world. Knowing that the judges see promise in the story I’ve worked so hard on and loved so deeply is incredibly encouraging. I’m so excited to see what will become of it.
- When did you begin writing? I fell in love with writing from the moment I learned how to read. However, I struggled with it when suffering from poor mental health in my 20s, and have had to work hard to rediscover the joy in it. I’m very grateful to have found it again.
I wrote my first full length novel by the time I was 16, though it will never see the light of day because it is seriously terrible. - What initially inspired your novel-in-progress? I got the idea for this novel when I came across a TikTok (doomscrolling finally pays off!) about a section of the Yorkshire River Wharfe known as the Bolton Strid, which is famous for being the deadliest stretch of water in the world and has been the scene of several fatalities. The name ‘Strid’ comes from the Old English word ‘Stryth’, which means ‘turmoil’. Ultimately, I used this setting to write a story which explores family, generational trauma, and womanhood.
- What made you enter Discoveries 2025? I entered on a whim, hoping that having a deadline to work towards would give me the motivation to finish. I’ve entered before and been rejected, so I didn’t like my chances. I’m very glad I did it anyway!
- Which female authors inspire you to write? Too many to count. The obvious: Margaret Atwood, Doris Lessing, Mary Shelley, the Brontës and Austen.
My biggest love is for books which explore the difficulties of womanhood, particularly in the horror genre. Recent joy has come from Lucy Rose’s , Emma van Straaten’s , and Monika Kim’s The Eyes Are the Best Part. - What is the best piece of writing advice you've ever received? From Wyl Menmuir on CBC’s Writing Your Novel course. I was worried after finishing my first draft that I still didn’t know what my novel wanted to be. He told me that nothing is ever set in stone, and that it’s ok for the novel to change as you write, all the way up to the final edit. It seems so obvious now, but that was a massive revelation.
Scholar Interview
Jac Felipez, A Long Ways from Home
Jac Felipez is Head of Languages at a London comprehensive school and fits her writing around the demands of teaching. Previously, she produced and directed television documentaries that focused on African-Caribbean stories, which aimed to amplify underrepresented voices on the small screen. Jac now uses fiction as a creative medium to explore the complex narratives of London’s minority communities. Her novel-in-progress A Long Ways from Home is set in North and East London. It is a story of family discord and chaos stemming from a hidden past of radical activism, deception and murder.
- How does it feel to be named the Discoveries Scholar for 2025? My first emotion on finding out that I had been selected as the Discoveries 2025 Scholar was disbelief and I had to read the email multiple times before it sunk in. The Discoveries process has positively validated my writing, and I feel elated and grateful to the readers and judges for believing in the potential of my novel-in-progress. I am proud to be part of the Discoveries 2025 cohort alongside so many remarkable women writers.
- What initially inspired your novel-in-progress? The inspiration for my current novel-in-progress came from visiting the Lubaina Himid retrospective at Tate Modern in 2022. I was particularly interested in her early works from the era of the Black Arts Movement. The exhibition prompted me to revisit non-fiction books about the 1980s, a decade characterised by uprisings, radical activism, and vibrant artistic expression. It was these elements that motivated me to begin writing a contemporary story that connected to this dynamic period in British history.
- When did you begin writing? I have been writing, in different ways, my whole life. From the first story my English teacher praised in front of the class to the novel-in-progress I am working on four decades later. Between these milestones, I've crafted documentary narration, written screenplay ideas and story treatments. I began writing fiction three years ago after revisiting the testimonies and experiences of past documentary interviewees and finding a wealth of stories that I wanted to tell.
- What made you enter Discoveries 2025? Writing fiction emerged from my enjoyment of reading. It was something I did for myself. Time carved out away from the stresses of teaching to work creatively on a story. It was the encouragement of my son and a close friend to do something with the book I kept telling them I was ‘trying’ to write that made me enter Discoveries. I hoped that it would show that I had a story that would resonate beyond my two readers.
- Which female authors inspire you to write? Dolores Redondo and Zadie Smith are two of the authors that inspire me. One hails from Navarra, the other from Willesden, their evocative and sensory depictions of the places in which they set their novels have shown me how integral location is to an engaging narrative. Their characters are grounded in their heritage, showing the importance of cultural authenticity, which has also influenced my writing.
- What is the best piece of writing advice you've ever received? To show not tell. This advice from a writer friend has helped me to think about how I can illustrate scenes through imagery and sensory details rather than using dialogue in an expositionary way. I am attempting to apply this advice, having come to the end of the first draft, by looking at the pacing of scenes and the balance of dialogue, action and imagery.
Thank you once again to everyone who entered their novels-in-progress to this year's Discoveries Prize. We were deeply impressed by the variety of genres and topics explored as well as the quality of the writing.
You can read all about the Discoveries 2025 shortlist here and the longlist here.
Watch this space, Discoveries 2026 will open for submissions this September. Subscribe to our newsletter to be notified when we open for entries.