The Black List will grant $10,000 to seven writers for its inaugural Unpublished Novel Award.

Today, the Black List, which originated as a yearly list of Hollywood’s most-admired but still-unproduced screenplays, announced the seven winners of its inaugural Unpublished Novel Award. Each winner will receive $10,000 to support their work.

The judging panel, which included Jennifer Baker, Marie-Helene Bertino, LeVar Burton, Tananarive Due, Roxane Gay, Radhika Jones, Victor LaValle, Emily Nemens, Duvall Osteen, Meredith Kaffel Simonoff, Eric Simonoff, and Traci Thomas, among others, read over 750 unpublished manuscripts, and chose one winner in each of seven genres: Children’s & Young Adult, Crime & Mystery, Horror, Literary Fiction, Romance, Science Fiction & Fantasy, and Thriller & Suspense.

“We created the Unpublished Novel Award to do what the Black List has always done: Find exceptional work and tell people about it,” said Black List founder Franklin Leonard in a statement. “The range and quality of these seven manuscripts is a reminder of just how much great work there is in the world that hasn’t yet been discovered. I look forward to seeing these novels on bookshelves and in book readers’ hands imminently.”

Here are this year’s winners:

CHILDREN’S & YOUNG ADULT

More Than Quiet by Terah Tsuyako Summers
A teen struggling with anxiety and depression, nearly invisible in her family and school, retreats into the fantasy she’s penning, but an invitation to a writing club allows her to begin breaking down the walls she’s built around herself.

CRIME & MYSTERY

Us Honest Crooks by Roslyn Ray
As the Spanish Flu ravages Prohibition-Era Seattle and her older brother is fighting in WWI, young bootlegger Rita Markey must defend her operation from a larger, more dangerous crime family in a scheme that stretches from dingy back alleys to the heart of city hall.

HORROR

A Box Came for You by David Barringer
A Box Came for You is a 65,000-word horror novel about Mitch Siebold, a naïve young man from a troubled Michigan family, who moves to an LA apartment to start a new life when he opens the wrong moving boxes and releases a vengeful spirit bent on his humiliation.

LITERARY

White Flame by Cam Terwilliger
In 1757, a physician struggling with syphilis grows embroiled in his older brother’s obsessive pursuit of the counterfeiter who threatens to bankrupt their family estate on New York’s colonial frontier. Drawn from a decade of research, White Flame dramatizes the intricate web of power that gave birth to contemporary America.

ROMANCE

We Meet Again by Jessica Ellis
Crashing out after the end of a bad marriage, Ariana agrees to a blind date, only to open an unexpected window to the past when it turns out to be with her long-lost first love.

SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY

Gates to Nowhere by Simon Nagel
As the lone mortician in Corona, New Mexico, Don Dupree has seen it all… until John White’s body arrives without records. Stranger still is Yuxi, the bewildered next of kin. After the worst embalming of his career, Don discovers the funeral ahead will be far from earthly.

THRILLER & SUSPENSE

Pressure by Rua Morrow
A devastating solar event strips Earth’s atmosphere, leaving survivors gasping for breath in a surreal, lethal world. A mother traveling with her young daughter is trapped in a grounded airplane as chaos erupts. Pressure is a story of survival, resilience, and the simultaneous collapse of a mind and a world.

If you have an unpublished manuscript in your drawer and could use $10,000 (all of us?), keep an eye out—submissions for next year’s Unpublished Novel Award will open in early 2026.