Bestselling Nigerian-British author Oyinkan Braithwaite Joins Women’s Prize Discoveries Jury

Summary: Bestselling Nigerian-British author Oyinkan Braithwaite has joined the Judging Panel for the Women’s Prize Trust’s Discoveries 2027.  The Women’s Prize Trust is a writer development programme designed to support and mentor unpublished women writers in the United Kingdom and Ireland.

Bestselling Nigerian-British author Oyinkan Braithwaite has joined the Judging Panel for the Women’s Prize Trust’s Discoveries 2027.  The programme is hosted annually by the Women’s Prize Trust, and it’s in its Seventh edition. 

Oyinkan is a trailblazer whose debut novel, My Sister, the Serial Killer, was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction and has since been translated into 30 languages.  She continued this momentum with her sophomore book, Cursed Daughters, which was released in 2025. The novel was shortlisted for the  Nero Awards and the British Book Awards’ Book of the Year: Audiobook Edition. Oyinkan, who also works as a screenwriter, now serves on the jury for the Women’s Prize Discoveries.

The Women’s Prize Trust is a writer development programme that supports and mentors unpublished women writers in the United Kingdom and Ireland. It functions as a literary competition and educational programme where writers submit their first 5,000 words of a novel-in-progress alongside a plot outline. The writing programme offers free online workshops, webinars, and curated writing resources for all applicants during the submission window. Afterwards, selected writers are directly paired with literary agents from Curtis Brown to receive a two-week Discoveries Writing Development Course and an Audible subscription. 

The overall winner receives an offer of literary representation from the Curtis Brown Group and a £5,000 cash prize, while the runner-up is awarded a fully funded 3-month novel-writing course and is also named the Discoveries Scholar.