Bloomsbury Academic Writing Fellowship 2025
About
Bloomsbury and Writers & Artists are delighted to confirm the Bloomsbury Academic Writing Fellowship will run for a third year, in 2025.
The purpose of the Bloomsbury Academic Writing Fellowship 2025 is to help early career academics get their book idea into a form which is ready for publication.
Applications are open to UK-based, up-and-coming authors and researchers who identify as Black, Asian or Ethnically Diverse (BAED).
The recipient of the Bloomsbury Fellowship will receive a package of creative support throughout 2026. This will include editorial support and mentorship for one year, £1,000 of financial support, practical resources, £250 worth of books from Bloomsbury Academic, plus event and networking opportunities. The ultimate goal of this industry-standard package of support is for early career scholars to develop their work to a point at which they feel in a position to begin approaching prospective publishers.
To ensure that the subjects covered by these works are wide-ranging and topical, your manuscript should cover one of the below key thematic topics from across the Humanities and Social Sciences:
Gender and Sexuality
Economics and International Development
Social Welfare, Society and Communities
Politics, Current Affairs and Government
Equality and Diversity
Climate and Environment
History and Cultural Heritage
Popular Culture and Media
Literary Studies
To enter
Provide a short statement (<200 words) about how your work aims to educate and inspire within one of the key thematic topics from across the Humanities and Social Sciences: Gender and Sexuality; Economics and International Development; Social Welfare, Society and Communities; Politics, Current Affairs and Government; Equality and Diversity; Climate and Environment; History and Cultural Heritage; Popular Culture and Media; Literary Studies.
- Provide a provisional Table of Contents and projected word count
- Provide a 200-word synopsis of the work
- Upload a 1,000-1,500 word sample extract of the work
- Have an account with writersandartists.co.uk, which is free to create
- Submit your entry via our online form
You do require an internet connection to submit your competition entry; however if you have any questions or specific accessibility queries, please do contact [email protected].
The application window for our 2025 Fellowship is now OPEN until 23:59pm UK time on 1st October, 2025. (Please note: it is possible to start and then save an application. Saved applications are stored under the 'My competition entries' section of your W&A dashboard.)
Dates and further announcements
Applications can be submitted between 9am UK time on the 1st September and 23:59pm UK time on the 1st October, 2025. The successful applicant(s), as chosen by our judging panel, will be announced in January 2026.
Judging panel
David Avital is Global Editorial Director for Bloomsbury Social Sciences. David has over 20 years’ experience in scholarly publishing across a number of subject areas at Bloomsbury, Continuum and Routledge.
Roberta Bassi is Publisher for the Hart Publishing imprint, which specialises in legal scholarship. She has worked in scholarly publishing for 10 years, and prior to that she worked in academia in the humanities.
Eli Keren is a non-fiction agent at Curious Minds, where he mainly works on expert-led evidence-based non-fiction for the commercial market. He was previously at United Agents for eight years. He was a regular judge on the Pat Kavanagh Prize and the Page Turner Awards and was an industry judge for the London Library’s Emerging Writers Programme 2022/23 and Retreat West’s First Chapter Prize 2024. In 2022 he developed and taught Jericho Writers’ ‘How To Write a Non-Fiction Proposal’ course, and in 2023 he was elected treasurer of the Association of Authors’ Agents, where he also acts as chair of the sub-committee for AI in publishing.
Anthony Mandal FHEA, FLSW is Professor of Print and Digital Cultures at Cardiff University, UK, and Past President (2019–24) of the British Association for Romantic Studies. He is the author of essays, books and digital outputs on Jane Austen, nineteenth-century literature and print culture, the gothic and digital humanities. He is also a General Editor of the New Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, University of Wales Gothic Originals series of scholarly editions, Bloomsbury Studies in Digital Cultures and the online journal Romantic Textualities: Literature and Print Culture, 1780–1840. Current projects include co-writing the second volume (1780–1900) of The Feminist History of Women’s Writing in the British Isles.
Marie-Pierre Moreau is Professor in the Sociology of Education, Work and Inequalities at Anglia Ruskin University, UK. She has published over 100 research reports, articles and books, mostly in the field of gender- and care-based equities in education contexts. An appointed expert to the European Commission, she is also the lead editor of the Bloomsbury Gender and Education book series and of the journal Access: Critical Explorations of Equity in Higher Education.
Kadian Pow is Lecturer in Sociology and Black Studies at Birmingham City University, UK. As one of Canvas 8 Expert Consultants in Cultural Trends, Kadian has worked on racial equity projects with Beatfreeks and museums in the UK and USA. Dr Pow contributes sociological commentary to popular culture articles for the BBC, The Guardian and USA Today among others. She is the author of Stories of Black Female Identity in the Making: Queering the Love in Blackness (2023).
Angela Smith is Emerita Professor of Language and Culture at the University of Sunderland, UK. She co-edits the Bloomsbury Library of Gender in Popular Culture and has published extensively in the areas of politeness theory, gender and sexuality. With Sunderland Culture, she runs the Rebel Women of Sunderland project which seeks to raise awareness of the contribution of remarkable women locally, and has recently produced a geo-location Black History walk for the city.
Duncan Wheeler is Professor and Chair of Spanish Studies at the University of Leeds, UK. Born in Aston, Birmingham, in 1981, he read Spanish and Philosophy at the University of Oxford. He is the general editor of the journal Modern Language Review, and his most recent book is Following Franco: Spanish Politics and Culture in Transition (2020). In 2016, he became the first non-Hispanic academic to be inducted into the Spanish Academy of Performing Arts in recognition of his translation and teaching of Spanish drama. Duncan is committed to public dissemination and is regularly invited to comment on politics and culture for the media in the UK, US and across Europe (BBC, Times Literary Supplement, HBO, Netflix, El Pais, London Review of Books, The Economist etc.).
Eligibility
To enter the Fellowship, all entrants must:
- Identify as Black, Asian or Ethnically Diverse (BAED)
- Be over 18 and living in the UK
- Not have a publishing contract or agent for the proposed work
Please note: projects previously submitted to the Bloomsbury Academic Writing Fellowship will not be considered.
The Fellowship
The successful recipient(s) of the Fellowship will receive a package of creative support throughout 2026. This will include:
Editorial support and mentorship:
- A bespoke mentoring programme offering industry-standard creative support (and unique insight into working with a publisher). This will be managed by Writers & Artists and Bloomsbury, and will include milestone editorial meetings throughout the year. (Mentor to be appointed based on the Fellowship recipient’s field of work, career history and aspirations). A typical one-year mentoring programme includes four milestone meetings of one-hour between the mentor and the successful applicant. Submission deadlines will be agreed before each of these sessions, with mentees expected to submit a tranche of original writing (to an agreed word count) in advance so that their mentor can prepare accordingly. Each one-hour meeting will be used to discuss progress, editorial suggestions and next steps. Mentors will offer a short follow-up report outlining everything discussed within the session. Where possible, we will encourage that at least one of the milestone meetings takes place in-person at Bloomsbury Publishing in London.
Financial support:
- The Fellowship will offer £1,000 in financial support to the recipient at the start of the fellowship year
Events and networking opportunities:
- Registration to a UK-based academic conference attended by Bloomsbury in 2026
- A complimentary place on Writing Non-Fiction, a five-week online course from Writers & Artists
- A complimentary place at any appropriate Writers & Artists events taking place in 2026
- An invitation to attend all appropriate relevant Bloomsbury Academic author events
- Invitations to participate in any relevant Bloomsbury Academic fellowship panels, recordings or events
- The option of a thirty-minute one-to-one consultation with a literary agent, who will provide proposal feedback and marketplace insight
Resources:
- Full access to Writers’ & Artists’ online listings: a one-year subscription to a database of thousands of industry contacts
- £250 of Bloomsbury Academic titles
The end goal of this invaluable, industry-standard package of support is that the author feels in a position to begin approaching prospective publishers.