Author and judge Ali Smith chose Astraea by Kate Kruimink and Aerth by Deborah Tomkins as the inaugural winners of the Weatherglass Novella Prize, which was launched "to celebrate the vitality and relevance of the novella form." The Bookseller reported that both winners will be published by Weatherglass Books.
Smith said: "The shortlist, in totality, was one of the most pleasurable and exciting things I've read in quite some time. The ways in which its writers dealt with the short-but-long/long-but-short constraints of the form; the problems and the opportunities that this gave them; and the remarkable standard of the writing from entry to entry reminded me that the novella form is a kind of marvel."