There are weeks when the universe feels like it’s conspiring in whispers; April was one of them. On an otherwise ordinary Tuesday my inbox produced a black-and-gold digital seal: Creativitys UK named me their April 2025 Award laureate for Anonymous Letters. A day later I learned that the manuscript also caught the eye of the Stein Arts Award committee, whose curators prize “works that dismantle categorical borders.” I wrote the book in a coffee-scented fugue of doubt; seeing it resonate across two different juries in the same month feels like the story is now writing back to me.
Yet honours rarely arrive alone. Last autumn Anonymous Letters walked away with the 2024 Cultural Russia Award for Literature, the jury praising its “psychological depth and mastery of the epistolary form” (published statement, 28 Oct 2024). And just ten days ago the Galactic Season Literary Competition slipped a jade-green diploma under my studio door, naming the novella draft that would become Letters the second-place winner in prose (20 Apr 2025) culture-russia-award.
“Fiction is a correspondence with strangers—sometimes they reply in the shape of awards.”
If you’d like to judge the text for yourself, Anonymous Letters is available exclusively on Kindle for now — you can grab a copy here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0F3K12FG3. (A limited hard-cover run is coming; newsletter subscribers will hear first.)
Meanwhile I’m living on trains, backstage stairwells and the inside of Moleskine margins: moderating debates at Soho’s Society Club, losing myself in library basements, and preparing my own series of world-building salons—the next one unfurls at Southbank Centre on 4 May. Event listings live permanently in the Events tab of this blog; feel free to stalk that calendar.
Awards are way-markers, not destinations. They remind me that the imaginary villages and cracked cosmologies we share can matter beyond the page. Thank you for meeting me inside them. Keep reading, keep questioning, keep sending those anonymous letters back.
— Writer Anastasia Dubinina