A Harpenden writer is one of just 20 authors selected for this year’s long-list in the Bridport Prize’s Peggy Champan-Andrews Award for a first novel.

'The Alchemy of Botany' by Kitty Edwards was selected from almost 1,100 entries to take one of the long-list places, which is being sent to publishers and agents across the country.

Kitty grew up in Manchester, studied law at Oxford, and now lives in Harpenden with her husband and daughters.

The Bridport Prize has categories in poetry, short stories, flash fiction (stories of 250 words or fewer) and first novels. This year over 10,000 writers from 83 countries competed for one of the 34 awards across the four competition categories.

The opening chapters of Kitty's novel are available to read in the Bridport Prize's Extracts from the Novel Longlist anthology, available to purchase on the website at https://www.bridportprize.org.uk/