Introducing the 2026 Shortlist

We hope you enjoy reading these extracts from this year’s Kelpies Prize for Writing shortlist – massive congratulations (in alphabetical order) to MJ Burns, Jenni Fuchs, Christine Irvine, Louisa McLennan and Hannah Watson!

The winner will be announced at an exclusive award ceremony on Friday 18th September 2026 at the Grassmarket Centre, Edinburgh. Keep an eye on our website and follow @DiscoverKelpies on Bluesky, Facebook and Instagram for details. You can also sign up to our mailing list to be the first to hear about Kelpies Prize news.

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MJ Burns

Inspired by a Scottish folktale, MJ Burns’ fantasy When the Ravens Whisper sees the ancient community of Calta taken over by a greedy emperor. The people must give up their language, traditions and magic – or starve. Young Kester and his beloved dog Skirlie have turned to poaching to survive. In this extract we find Kester with fish in hand and imperial soldiers on his tail…

I’m in so much trouble. More than that. I’m dead.

That’s what makes me move at last. I let the fish go. I have to. I let it slide back into the water. I can’t carry it and get away fast enough.

A soldier clambers down the rocks at the riverbank.

Time to go.

I am on my feet in an instant and scramble up the tall rocks beside me. My legs are numb and fright makes them tremble. The rocks are wet and slippery. It takes me three attempts to properly gain grip.

“Stop! I command you, stop in the name of the emperor!”

I heave myself up to the top of the rock. And I don’t stop there. I climb until I reach the highest point in the island.

If the soldier gets over here, he’ll arrest me, kill me.

They are still shouting. Skirlie is howling. From my vantage point, I can see the layout of the little island with its scrappy wind-flustered trees swirling in time with the big ones that line the riverbanks. If I can make it across, I can disappear into the forest. But the riverbank on the other side is too high to jump up to, and on that side the river is wider. I curse and curse and curse again! I’ve trapped myself.

The soldier is almost across. He is calculated in each step he makes across the foaming water, his steps quick and athletic. I have to run. Anywhere. I stumble over the tops of the rocks, begging the wind to help my feet be light and land where they need to. If I fall I could break my neck.

Something zips past my face. So fast I hear it. My vision stings with how close it was to my nose. It meets its mark – thunk – into a tree at the other side of the river.

If I had been a second faster, that arrow would have lodged itself straight into the side of my head.

The soldier will be here any second. I can hear him closer. His clanking armour. His huffing breath. If I can jump into the water, the current could take me fast towards the loch. I decide to take my chance and race for the edge of the island, about to do whatever the wind guides me to, when I hear the shout.

“STOP. I HAVE YOUR DOG.”

I freeze.

A young voice. I turn around and see a girl – a noble girl – with one hand in Skirlie’s fur and, in the other, the long glinting edge of a blade.

The girl sees that she has my attention. She acknowledges it with a smirk. She puffs away a lock of dark hair escaping from her headdress, holds the dagger high and crouches on the ground, uncaring for her expensive dress getting muddy. Her smirk turns into a triumphant grin when she sees me walking forward.

Her father stands back watching the scene unfold, his arms crossed and a scowl etched onto his features.

“Put up your hands,” the girl says coolly. “Don’t run.”

There is an edge of mocking laughter to her voice. She is enjoying this. My mouth is dry as sawdust.

“Please… don’t hurt her.”

Even as I say it, I know my protests are pointless. I am doomed.

“Kneel,” the girl says as her father steps forward. “Kneel before the mighty Prince Aurelius.”

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Jenni Fuchs

Jenni Fuchs’s picture book text is about a little gust of wind called Wilma, who longs to contribute, and to be seen and understood. Wilma loves her home full of gentle breezes and whooshing whirlwinds, but she wonders what she might discover in the big wide world. In this extract, she sets off to find out…

Wilma floated along the clifftops above a bay.

Suddenly – whoosh! –a flock of puffins whirred past her, bright as splashes of paint against the grey rocks, then tumbled towards the waves.

But from the short grass Wilma heard soft crying. At the cliff edge sat a scruffy puffling with its eyes squeezed shut.

Two rangers stood nearby said, “Poor wee thing.”

“Yes, its wing is mended, but it still won’t jump.”

 

“What’s wrong, little one?” Wilma whispered. “Don’t be feart.”

She curled around the little bird, gentle as a sigh.

“Huff… puff…” She blew with all her might.

Up they rose, as Wilma carried the shaking bird on her breath over the glittering sea.

“Look at that!” cried the rangers.

“He can fly after all!”

Wilma was so pleased she nearly dropped him.

 

Gently, Wilma guided the puffling back to the grassy cliff.

“Look what I can do!” she called.

But the rangers clapped for the bird.

“What a brave puffling!”

“What strong wee wings!”

No one saw the little gust of wind who had carried him.

 

A day later, Wilma drifted further along the coast where a small fishing boat bobbed.

Its engine had coughed and gone quiet, and now it was drifting towards sharp black rocks.

The crew leaned over the side, helpless.

 

Wilma filled her chest with cool sea air.

“Huff… puff…”

Ripples tickled the water.

“Huff… puff…”

The ripples grew into waves, nudging the stranded boat.

Slowly, slowly, Wilma pushed it towards the harbour.

People cheered as the boat slid into safety..

“The tide has brought the boat in!” someone cried.

“It was me!” Wilma called.

But no one heard her.

 

Wilma went exploring again.

Above the beach she found a field full of children all running up and down with colourful kites that swooped and darted against the sky.

Except the smallest boy, who stood alone at the edge of the field.

 

He tried to lift his kite, but when he let go, it  flopped back onto the grass.

“Let me try with you,” Wilma whispered. “Hold on tight.”

The boy lifted his arms again.

Wilma rushed underneath the kite.

With a sudden WHOOSH it leapt into the air –

climbing higher on the string,

until it soared above the other kites.

The boy’s eyes grew round.

The other children stopped running.

“How did you get it so high?” one asked.

 

“I…” the small boy began, as the kite pulled and soared, looping and dipping.

He almost said: I’m the best kite flyer in the whole world!

But he felt the gentle push at his back.

“It’s the wind,” he said instead, very softly.

“The what?” asked another child.

“The wind!” the boy said, louder now. “We can’t see her – but look what she can do!”

 

Wilma’s heart swelled bigger than a storm cloud.

That night, she made one last loop of her own: round and perfect and full of starlight.

 

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Christine Irvine

In Christine Irvine’s middle-grade entry, Water and Wild Things, a heatwave sees 12-year-old Alison trying to escape her warring parents, distant sister and local bullies by hiding out in the Greenery – a patch of forest in the middle of her housing estate. But deep within all the green someone (or something) else is hiding too – a shapeshifter, marooned far from home by the drought. In this extract, Alison, venturing into a tunnel in the forest to cool off, encounters this unexpected creature. But are they friend or foe…

My gaze darted over the dark wall of the tunnel. The glitter of reflected sunlight stuck to the damp bricks and for a second I thought I’d imagined them – eyes, in the wall, haha – but no; as my own gaze adjusted to the gloom I found them again. A pair of eyes. They blinked at me: once, slow. I stared back.

“Don’t hurt me,” I breathed.

Further down the tunnel, water dripped. Drip. Drip drip.

The eyes blinked again. The whites had a yellowish tinge around the outside and the centres were as dark as the tunnel around us, a deep, muddy black.

For a minute that stretched out and out like chewing gum I didn’t speak and I didn’t move; I could hardly make myself breathe and so I could hear the other creature’s breath just barely an arm’s length away from me, shuddery and fast and flat. Like it was scared. Maybe it was scared.

“Are you hiding?” I whispered.

Then, all at once, the eyes – the thing attached to the eyes – moved. It moved, and when it moved it rustled, rattled, breathed out with a sound like dead leaves dancing across a pavement and I dug my heels into the mud and tried to push myself up, away, back onto my feet. My fingernails scraped concrete.

Maybe it was angry.

Drip. Drip drip.

It peeled itself away from the bricks. It seemed to be made of too many parts, too many limbs, too many bones. The eyes appeared and disappeared. Sunlight painted wobbly stripes and dots across its slimy skin. Scaly skin. Rumpled skin. Inky black hair slunk downwards towards the water like seaweed.

“I’m Al!” I stammered, maybe shouted. My mouth wasn’t working that well. “I’m Al, I’m… I’m hiding too.”

It was hard to see in the shadows. But as I stared at it, its whole form seemed to push and pull, like modelling clay in invisible hands. It kept changing. But the eyes stayed the same. Stayed fixed on mine.

“I didn’t mean to get in your way,” I told it. “It’s just… it’s so hot. It’s cool in here.”

A strange feeling was starting in my head: it felt thick and clogged, like when you hold your breath and drop underwater in the swimming pool and all the bright echoing sounds of other people fade away.

“It’s so hot,” I tried again. “It’s never normally like this here. Usually it rains all summer…”

I don’t know why the words kept coming out. My skin felt weird; fizzy. The dank tunnel seemed to be shrinking around me, squeezing, pushing air out of my lungs.

“Do you like the rain…?” I asked, stupidly. “I do… I like—”

Then a laugh sliced open the thick summer air. My head snapped up and I squinted into the hot white glare of sunlight beyond the tunnel entrance.

Others.

The creature moved again, this time a sharp jerk sideways, and I reached out with my left hand: “No – don’t, they’re not nice people, they won’t—”

And then its mouth opened and its long head darted forward and its teeth snatched at my outstretched arm.

I shouted, pain flashing red through my body. But that was enough to shock some sense into me – throwing a last glance at the monster, I shoved myself away from the wall and took off running, slipping and sliding until I crashed out of the tunnel and into the blistering heat of the afternoon.

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Louisa MacDougall

In a great white shark’s lifetime, it will lose up to 30,000 teeth. That would mean A LOT of visits from the tooth fairy – if sharks had a tooth fairy… In this extract, adapted from the opening chapters of The Shark Tooth Fairy, we meet a shark family causing a commotion in the ocean, and a human girl beach-combing in a bay, who will soon be offered the most unusual job…

Deep in the ocean, something was wrong.

You could tell because the turtles were tucked into their shells, the octopuses were cowering in their caves, and frightened fishes were skulking in the kelp forest. Anything to avoid the Great White Shark frenzy.

This wasn’t a feeding frenzy, with splattering blood and splintering bones (those are horrid, but generally over quickly), it was more of a tantrum.

“WHY didn’t she visit MEEE?” howled a shark (who, while great, was actually quite young).

“Who didn’t, my liddle sea cucumber?” asked his mother.

“The Toooth Fairy!” He thwacked his tail on the ocean floor, and twenty-seven miles away in Dorsal Bay the ripples became a giant wave, which soaked sixteen sunbathers, washed two toddlers’ ice creams out of their sticky hands and drenched a girl who was picking up litter.

“The twoos ferry?” asked his mother again, confused.

“THE. TOOTH. FAIRY!”

Mother Shark focused two glassy eyes on her son. To a shark, teeth are always an important matter.

“Hammerhead said that when human children lose a tooth, a fairy comes, and she leaves a gift!” Shark Junior spat out three needle-sharp teeth. “I lost two hundred teeth this week, and I never got ONE gift. NOT ONE!”

Shark Junior’s mother digested what he had said (she was digesting a tasty tuna too).

“Are you saying this ‘fairy’ visits humans every time they lose a tooth?” she asked.

He nodded.

Mother shark’s gills rippled with rage. She ripped a crumbling plank from a nearby shipwreck and chomped into it:

Ak-ak-ak

Then she passed the plank to a passing Remora fish. “Deliver this to FG,” she snapped. “Tell her to recruit a SHARK Tooth Fairy TODAY. Or the Ocean Pact is OVER!”

 

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In Dorsal Bay (twenty-seven miles away) a girl with a wobbly tooth sat on the sand, wringing water out of her shark-pattern socks.

Mara had just kept her balance when a freak wave had sloshed over the beach. She had clung on to the bin bag of rubbish she had collected, but her wellies and socks were soaked.

She wasn’t leaving yet though. The surprise bath had sent the sunbathers squelching homewards, so she had the beach to herself, apart from a few curious seals stretched like bananas on the rocks. It was the perfect afternoon for beach combing.

She left her wellies to dry and walked along the shore, twiddling her wobbly tooth with her tongue. With a final tongue-twist, her tooth popped out.

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The tiny person flitting around Mara’s attic bedroom later that evening was not the tooth fairy of storybooks. It was not the tooth fairy she would have imagined if she wasn’t almost ten and much too sensible to imagine such things at all.

This person had green spiky hair, flamingo-pink trainers, and dungarees the colour of daffodils. He had woken her by squeaking into a mobile phone that looked like a caterpillar. If it hadn’t been for the wings and the fact that, just that afternoon, Mara had lost a canine tooth, she would never have guessed that this was a tooth fairy at all. He hadn’t even noticed that Mara’s eyes were open.

“I know I said I would do anything for you, but I won’t do that,” he said. “It’s the worst job ever. It needs speed, stealth, strength and the courage of a killer whale. Not a timid flower fairy who HATES getting his wings wet. Goodnight, Godmother!”

He squished his caterpillar-phone into a ball, popped it in a pouch on the front of his dungarees, twirled around… and realised that Mara was awake.

“What’s this job then?” said Mara.

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Hannah Watson

It’s a hot summer in New York, and twelve-year-old Oliver Botany and his friends are escaping the heat in the Met Museum. His favourite is the Egyptian section, full of ancient statues of strange animal-headed gods. But when his brother Tad goes missing, Oliver discovers that these myths might be real after all – and dangerous. In this extract from Oliver Botany and the Book of the Dead, Oliver is sitting outside on his building’s fire escape during a blackout, when he spots something very strange on the streets below…

The fire escape was rusty and creaked alarmingly, but in summer it was high enough to sometimes catch a breeze. The sun was all the way down now. Below Oliver, the streetlights and the storefronts were dark, and cars and taxis lit up the sidewalks in brief flickering streaks.

Oliver shifted restlessly on the flaking iron step, idly licking a lime-flavored popsicle drip from his arm. Without the glare of lights outlining the top of the tall buildings, the city blocks looked strange and unfamiliar, and not much like a city at all. It was like a huge dark labyrinth laid out by a giant for a purpose Oliver couldn’t imagine.

29th Street was quieter than the avenue, and the corner was in deep shadow. Then the shadows moved, and Oliver realised that someone was standing there, hugging the side wall of the bodega. Just then a firetruck came roaring up the street, and for a single second the sidewalk was lit up in a white flare of light. Oliver caught a flash of something human-shaped but hopelessly top-heavy: the slick blunt mass of a hippopotamus snout starkly outlined in the glare.

The figure was moving towards the crosswalk, surprisingly lightly for its size. But then the firetruck swept on and crossed the intersection, and the street was dark again.

Oliver’s heart was beating wildly. He ducked low to creep further down the fire escape, wincing as the metal squeaked and groaned.

‘Hello Oliver,’ said a voice from below, while he was around the second-floor level. Oliver froze, then made himself look down.

But the person standing on the street below him was an ordinary middle-aged Hispanic lady. Her hair was neatly tied back and she was wearing pale-blue medical scrubs. Maybe she was a doctor, or a nurse like Oliver’s mum.

‘How do you know my name?’ he asked.

‘Your brother’s in trouble, Oliver,’ she said.

Tad can look after himself, was what Oliver meant to say, but what actually came out was, ‘Is he hurt?’ and his voice sounded weird, too high and fast, and he realised his hands had clenched into fists.

‘Not yet,’ she said, which wasn’t reassuring.

‘What kind of trouble?’ said Oliver, his mind racing. Some of the people Tad worked with could seem kind of sketchy. But then why would they send a doctor here and not a cop?

‘He’s in a dangerous place, and I’m afraid he won’t be able to find his way out again,’ she said.

‘He went somewhere dangerous?’ said Oliver, feeling sick. ‘Why? I mean – where’d he go? Just tell me where Tad is, and I’ll go find him.’

‘You stay well away,’ the doctor said. ‘That’s what I came here to tell you. There are bigger things happening in the city, Oliver. Watch for the light to come back. And keep your eyes open.’

And then she was walking away. Only her stretched-out shadow lingered. From behind, she was just an ordinary lady on her way home from work, but the shadow thrown out long behind her didn’t match that figure. In another glare of headlights, the bulky, snouted profile of a hippopotamus was sharply outlined for a single moment, before the car slid past, and it vanished too.

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