Public voting is now open.

This is your chance to help choose the winner and guide our judges!

Our Finalists

Click on the first sentences from our shortlisted writers to read the full entry. Once you have read them, select just one as your favorite, and vote in the side panel. One vote per person only, folks!

Thank you for supporting our shortlisted candidates. All of them will be enrolled into The Novelry on our flagship Finished Novel Course, but one of them will scoop the grand prize of $100,000 (£75,000). Your vote matters! Our judges will take into account the popular vote when they meet as a panel, chaired by Women’s Prize for Fiction winner Tayari Jones, to make the final decision.

Hurry! Public voting closes October 5, midnight EST.

The winner will be announced at this page on October 12.

Finalist 1

He wanted to teach me a lesson, so he left me on the side of the road somewhere in rural Missouri.

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Finalist 2

Grace Labeille is turning twenty on top of a man who does not love her and will not date her.

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Finalist 3

The birds stopped singing on the morning of the audit.

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Finalist 4

If you ever wake up in a gilded carriage pulled by white horses with shimmering manes, don’t panic. You’re already doomed.

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Finalist 5

You can fit the entire cremated remains of a 5ft 2” woman inside a hot water bottle.

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Finalist 6

Every night for almost a month after her son’s suicide on TikTok live, their cat waits.

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Finalist 7

The sheep didn’t care that the dictator was dying.

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Finalist 8

Harlow had never known what it meant to be clean.

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Our Finalists

He wanted to teach me a lesson, so he left me on the side of the road somewhere in rural Missouri.

Grace Labeille is turning twenty on top of a man who does not love her and will not date her.

The birds stopped singing on the morning of the audit.

If you ever wake up in a gilded carriage pulled by white horses with shimmering manes, don’t panic. You’re already doomed.

You can fit the entire cremated remains of a 5ft 2” woman inside a hot water bottle.

Every night for almost a month after her son’s suicide on TikTok live, their cat waits.

The sheep didn’t care that the dictator was dying.

Harlow had never known what it meant to be clean.

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