We're back with the second instalment of The Shortlist Sessions, and today we're delighted to introduce two more of our Book Edit Writers' Prize shortlisted writers.
This week we’re featuring Matthew Fothergill and Susannah Jong-Sook Bond.
Matthew Fothergill
Matthew Fothergill is an emerging literary and historical fiction writer from North Yorkshire, where Captain Cook was born and first went to sea. Drawing on his sailing experience and work with the Royal Navy, he explores endurance, memory, and moral complexity in his debut novel Spirit of Endeavour.
Spirit of Endeavour
Spirit of Endeavour reimagines Captain James Cook’s first Pacific voyage as a mythic, psychological odyssey. Blending maritime realism with lyrical prose, it examines empire, memory, and the moral cost of exploration through an ensemble cast – while Indigenous perspectives, deeply human and transformative, recast discovery as reckoning and turn survival into shared understanding.
Instagram @mdf_writing
Susannah Jong-Sook Bond
Susannah is a Korean foundling, adopted by an English family. She has completed the Curtis Brown six-month novel course and is now on the Jericho Writers Ultimate Novel Course. She was shortlisted for the Jericho Writers Friday Night Live 2025 and came in the top 100 of the Cheshire Novel Prize 2025.
When the Cherry Blossom Falls
Set in 1964 post-war Korea, a noblewoman abandons her illegitimate baby at a police station expecting she’ll be adopted abroad, but a police officer takes the infant home to his wife, passing it off as their own. The child grows up just doors away unaware her origins must be guarded to keep her family safe while the noblewoman must decide whether to claim her daughter and ruin her position in society or watch others raise her.
Instagram @susannahjsbond
We hope you enjoy this latest edition of the Shortlist Sessions. Stay tuned next week for two more fabulously talented writers.