Screenwriter Thara Popoola has won Modern Stories: It Must Be Love 2026 for her novel-in-progress Right Person, Wrong Timeline, Curtis Brown Creative announced, with J. D. Malle’s Deathborn: The Hidden Hearts and Violet E. Scott’s The Song Beneath Iron named runners-up.

Now in its second year, Modern Stories runs as part of Hachette UK’s The Future Bookshelf, hosted by Headline Eternal with Curtis Brown Creative as this year’s partner. The prize exists to support emerging writers of romance fiction from Black, Asian, mixed-heritage, and other minority ethnic backgrounds, and this year’s winner and runners-up were drawn from a shortlist that also included Amara Ede’s The Benefits of Marriage, Aditi Nichani’s The Elegance of Rollercoasters, and Yolanda Tang’s Fashionable Love. The panel judging this year’s entries included Headline Eternal senior commissioning editor Soraya Bouazzaoui, Curtis Brown Creative’s Abby Parsons, authors Rufaro Faith Mazarura and Maame Blue, Book Lovers Bookshop founder Caden Armstrong, and Stylist senior writer Amy Beecham, who described narrowing the field to a winner and two runners-up as no easy task given the quality on display.

Popoola is a NAACP-nominated screenwriter and Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree whose television credits include Sex Education, Queenie, and Crongton; Right Person, Wrong Timeline is her debut novel-in-progress. Speaking to Curtis Brown Creative after the win, she said the recognition felt “really, really encouraging” after feeling out of her depth moving from screenwriting into fiction. The novel began, she explained, from a pile of television ideas she hadn’t been able to place elsewhere and was originally conceived as genre-bending science fiction before her long-standing love of rom-coms pulled it toward romantic comedy. She named Octavia Butler as a formative influence for centering Black women in expansive worlds, alongside Jacqueline Wilson, whose books she read obsessively as a child before going off to write her own.

As winner, Popoola receives a £1,000 cash prize, a place on Curtis Brown Creative’s three-month Writing Your Novel course, editorial mentoring sessions, a meeting with Curtis Brown literary agent Sheila Crowley, and a hamper of romance titles. Runners-up Malle and Scott each receive a place on one of Curtis Brown Creative’s five- or six-week courses, an editorial mentoring session, an introductory meeting with a Curtis Brown agent, and a hamper of their own. Malle, a Cameroonian-Swedish writer based in London, was previously shortlisted for the inaugural Penguin Michael Joseph Undiscovered Writers’ Prize and is a 2026 Black Girl Writers mentee, while Scott, entering creative writing for the first time, said the win felt surreal given how difficult reading and writing were for them growing up with undiagnosed ADHD.

Read the full announcement and interviews with all three writers via Curtis Brown Creative.