Submissions now closed for the 2025 BBC Young Writers’ Award

LAUREN LAYFIELD is a British Guyanese TV presenter, radio broadcaster, DJ, journalist and writer.  She co-hosts Life Hacks and The Official Chart: First Look for BBC Radio 1, leading the conversation about issues that affect young people today before counting down the twenty biggest songs in the UK. A regular television presenter, she has also worked on The One Show, Match of the Day, Children in Need and Eurovision coverage.

Her debut teen novel ‘Indi Raye is Totally Faking It’ was published in August 2023 by Hachette UK. Lauren is an ambassador for period poverty organisation Bloody Good Period and for mental health charity Young Minds.  

JESSICA MOOR grew up in south-west London and studied English at Cambridge before completing a Creative Writing MA at Manchester University, where her dissertation was awarded the Creative Writing Prize for Fiction. Prior to this she spent a year working in the violence against women and girls sector, and this experience inspired her critically acclaimed first novel, Keeper.

She was selected as one of the Observer’s ten best debut novelists of 2020, and Keeper was longlisted for the Desmond Elliot Prize, shortlisted for an Edgar Award and received the Nouvelle Voix du Polar award. Her second novel, Young Women, was published to critical acclaim in 2022 and her third, Hold Back the Night, was published by Bonnier in 2024. She lectures in Creative Writing at the University of Bristol and teaches on the Faber Academy’s prestigious Writing a Novel course. She lives in London.

LOTTIE MILLS  is the author of the short story collection Monstrum. She studied English at Newnham College, Cambridge. In 2020, she won the BBC Young Writers’ Award for her short story ‘The Changeling’, having been previously shortlisted in 2018. She has written for BBC Radio 1, BBC Radio 4, and British Vogue, and has appeared on programmes such as Life Hacks, Front Row, and Woman’s Hour to discuss her writing. She is currently studying for an MPhil in English at the University of Cambridge.

JOSEPH COELHO is a best-selling, multi-award winning children’s playwright and author of over 50 books. His The Boy Lost in The Maze was the winner of the 2024 Carnegie Medal for writing and has received international acclaim appearing on the White Raven Book list – Munich, The IBBY UK Honour Books List and awarded The Extraordinary Book of 2023 by The International Children’s Literature Festival of Berlin. Joseph was the Waterstones Children’s Laureate 2022 – 2024.

MATT GOODFELLOW is a former primary school teacher and now a full-time author and poet who visits schools around the UK to give hugely popular, high-energy performances and workshops. His debut novel The Final Year published in 2023 to critical acclaim and bestseller success, winning the prestigious CLiPPA award in 2024. The First Year, the eagerly-anticipated follow-up to the bestselling The Final Year, publishes in April 2025. Matt lives in Stockport.