Competition | HNS 2026 Conference, Maynooth Campus

HNS 2026 First Chapters Competition

The Category Shortlists are here.

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We have been collating and sending out feedback to the 643 entrants throughout May and are still going. If you haven't received yours yet, it should be with you by the end of June. Bear with us. It's a huge task and not possible to automate it!

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The HNS 2026 First Chapters Competition had over 640 entries and was a closely fought contest this year with so many entries of a very high calibre. We are delighted to announce the 10 Category Winners in the competition, who each win £500 and a ticket to the HNS 2026 conference.

These 10 writers now go forward to Round 3, judged by publisher Karen Sullivan, agent Therese Coen, and writer Martina Devlin. The overall winner will be announced at the HNS 2026 conference gala dinner on Saturday 22nd August and on this webpage.

Many congratulations to the Round 2 runners-up, achieving silver, bronze and honourable mentions.

Huge thank you to all the judges.

Category Winners

Ancient–10th-century Historical Fiction

11–16th-century Historical Fiction

17th–19th-century Historical Fiction

20th-century Historical Fiction

Historical Romance

Historical Crime

Biographical Historical Fiction

Historical Adventure

Historical Fantasy/Timeslip/Alternative History

Children’s and Young Adults’ Historical Fiction

The Last Light by J. H. Mann (UK)

Jason Mann, writing as J. H. Mann, is an award-winning journalist and novelist whose fiction draws on Cornwall’s myths, history and landscapes. He lives in South West England and is a shore-based volunteer with the RNLI lifeboat service.

A near-blind Roman commander’s daughter, stranded on Britain’s wild frontier, must choose between the empire she was born into and the tribal world – and man – she comes to love.

Servants of Heaven by Aron Paul (Spain)

Aron Paul grew up between Malaysia and Australia. He trained as an academic historian and has a fascination for places between ‘East and West’.

Servants of Heaven: Orion never knew that his mother had abandoned him to become a handmaid to the Empress of Byzantium, until a twist of fate delivered him into the service of the Great Palace. Thrust into its intrigues and power struggles, he must decide where his true loyalties lie.

Cribb’s Blooding by Paul Clabburn (UK)

Paul Clabburn is a journalist by profession, including 25 years with BBC News. After retiring, he obtained an MA in Archaeology. He lives in Chichester, UK, where he enjoys owning and managing a small woodland. He is married with an adult daughter.

Cribb’s Blooding: London, January 1805. Tom Cribb, novice bare-knuckle boxer, stumbles across a mutilated body and is drawn into the shadowy world of a murderous opponent far deadlier than any he’ll face in the prize ring.

The Huguenot’s Chest by Cassie Smith-Christmas (Ireland)

Cassie Smith-Christmas lives in Galway. Her unpublished novel The Huguenot’s Chest was a winner in the Irish Writers Centre Novel Fair and the Blue Pencil Agency’s Pitch Prize. Her writing has appeared in Southword, Crannóg, Gutter, The Wild Word, and Frazzled Lit and she has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and a Forward Prize for Poetry.

The Huguenot’s Chest: A professor searching for a lost legend in the Florida Keys. A shell-shocked WWI veteran trying to recover on a deserted island and his alluring wife unhappy with her enforced solitude. Their three fates come to a head in the hurricane of 1919.

Smiling woman wearing a blue knit headband and black jacket standing on a rocky shoreline.

Bright Light on Blue Water by Jennifer Delamere (US)

Jennifer Delamere is the author of nine novels set in Victorian England. Her new series aboard a 1920s transatlantic ocean liner explores the lives of passengers and crew amid the Great War’s aftermath and the Jazz Age.

Bright Light on Blue Water: On a transatlantic voyage to rescue his wayward sister from scandal, a battle-scarred English veteran of the Great War who still mourns his fiancée killed by German soldiers finds his heart unexpectedly awakened by a fresh-faced American heiress. But there are old enemies aboard the ship, leading to a brutal showdown that will force him to confront his own darkness and choose between vengeance and redemption.

Men of Ruin by Alexandra McDermott (UK)

Alexandra McDermott is a graduate of City University's Novel Studio. She is working on a series of crime novels set across post-war Europe, featuring private investigator Stephen Kenward. She lives in Berkshire and is devoted to ballroom dancing and fountain pens.

Men of Ruin: In 1950s London, PI Stephen Kenward is tasked with establishing which nominee for chairman of a peace committee has been denounced in an anonymous letter. To delve into the candidates’ pasts, he recruits a team of typists to help him infiltrate their businesses, but as the team’s discoveries mount up, so do the secrets – and danger.

A Person of Quality by Myrlin Hermes (US)

Myrlin A. Hermes is the author of the Lambda award-winning Shakespearean frolic, The Lunatic, the Lover, and the Poet and Careful What You Wish For, a family drama set in the American south of the 1940s-60s. She lives in Portland, Oregon.

A Person of Quality: How did Aphra Behn, a 17th-century barber’s daughter, rise in just three years from obscurity and debtors’ prison to become Restoration London’s literary sensation, the first female playwright produced on the public stage? Humorous misadventures among taverns, theatres, and mollyhouses are set against the tragic aftermath of war, plague and the Great Fire of London. Series potential with other episodes of Aphra’s colourful life as a world-traveller and international spy.

The Bruges Affair by Jenise Boland (Canada)

Jenise Boland writes at the intersection of history, mystery, and a little plot-twistory. Born in Northern Canada and educated at the University of Cambridge, with detours through Mexico and the Arctic, she focuses on women, power, and stories that don’t behave as expected.

The Bruges Affair: A widowed duchess is drawn into a covert network of women spies in Napoleonic Europe, only to discover her most dangerous mission is choosing who she can trust.

A View of the Open Sky: A Novel in Letters by Elisa Oh (US)

Elisa Oh is an English professor at Howard University, where she teaches and researchs Shakespeare, literary theory, and drama across cultures. Her fiction projects always percolate frothily alongside her scholarly work. She lives, co-parents, and writes letters in Northern Virginia.

A View of the Open Sky: A Novel in Letters: An alternate eighteenth-century epistolary romp about women helping women, mixed-race identity, and a kaleidoscope of breakups. In her quest to escape a forced marriage, can heiress Edith trust the thief Mercurius to help her find her grandmother’s secret inheritance?

Murder is her Hobby by Kristin Tubb (US)

Kristin O’Donnell Tubb is the award-winning author of eleven middle-grade novels, including Fowl Play, The Decomposition of Jack, Luna Howls at the Moon, Zeus, Dog of Chaos, The Story Collector series, and A Dog Like Daisy. In June 2026, watch for Tubb’s debut young adult novel, The Spiritualists. Kristin lives near Nashville, Tennessee with her bouncy-loud family. Just like her two dogs, she can be bribed with cheese.

Murder is her Hobby: When 17-year-old Anna Logan’s father’s death is ruled a suicide, she knows she must prove it was indeed a murder to salvage the life insurance money that will pay for her college. She recruits the assistance of Frances Glessner Lee, the first woman police chief in the United States, who is known for the small-scale ‘murder dollhouses’ (the ‘Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death’) she constructs to aid in training police and FBI crime scene investigators.