The winners of the IndieReader Discovery Awards, sponsored by IndieReader, have been announced. Winners in the many categories can be seen here. The winners of the fiction and nonfiction categories are:
Fiction:
First Place: The Last Whaler by Cynthia Reeves
Second Place: A Fondness for Truth by Kim Hays
Third Place: The Puppy Prophet by David Cary Lane
Nonfiction:
First Place: Property of the Revolution: From a Cuban Barrio to a New Hampshire Mill Town by Ana Hebra Flaster
Second Place: The Endless Sphere of Time, photographs by Geir Jordahl, poetry by Rolf Jacobsen
Third Place: Celebrating Comfy, Cozy Foods from North America by Astrid Tuttle Winegar
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Rosie Rowell won the Women's Prize Trust Discoveries Prize for Down by the Stryth. Curtis Brown Creative and Curtis Brown literary agency partner with the Women's Prize Trust and Audible to run Discoveries, a writing development award and program for unpublished women writers.
As winner, Rowell 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 (about $6,350), 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 (about $2,565) to further develop her work-in-progress: A Long Ways from Home.
Chair of judges Kate Mosse 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.' "