The programme, a partnership between the Genesis Foundation and the Jewish Literary Foundation, offers bursaries, mentoring, peer support and an event at London’s longest-running literary festival Jewish Book Week to the 10 successful applicants. Now in its fifth year, the programme is open to all UK residents over 18 years of age with no more than three years’ experience of being published. You can watch a short film about the programme here.
Mentor: Sophie Herxheimer
Ophira Adar is a poet and writer from London. Her poetry has appeared in Shearsman, Poetry Wales, 14 Magazine and Under The Radar. Her pamphlet Say I Am Not Your Mother was highly commended in The Poetry Business International Book & Pamphlet Competition in 2025. She holds an MA in Writing Poetry from The Poetry School.
Ophira’s debut poetry collection A Calculation of Absences explores the construction and deconstruction of self through memory and desire. Moving between spiritual, embodied and philosophical inquiry, the poems question how we author our own lives, inhabit the space between past and present selves, and how absence can become a generative force of its own.
Mentor: Katherine Clements
Claire Berliner is a writer, editor and literary events programmer. Much of her writing focuses on Jewish culture and identity, including a co-written short film, which won the Jewish Film Festival Short Film Fund, a puppet show, which was part of the Southbank Imagine Children’s Festival and her novel-in-progress, which also involves puppets.
Claire’s project is a historical novel, set across the rolling storm of the twentieth century. It follows Zelda as she leaves Poland and arrives in New York as Yiddish culture is thriving and politics is at its most febrile. There, she joins a radical Yiddish puppet troupe and her life truly begins.
Mentor: Louisa Treger
Kitty Blain is a twenty-five year old writer from St. Albans, Hertfordshire. Her work was awarded the Avril Bruten Award for Creative Writing in 2020 and second place in the Oxford BNU Creative Writing Award in 2023. She works as a bookseller, editor and freelance literary translator from Turkish to English.
Project: Kitty’s novel-in-progress, ‘The Edge of Heaven’, follows the complex friendship of two women from different classes and backgrounds, Emine and Özgür, across a twenty-year period. Set against the backdrop of mid-2000s Turkey, it asks whether we are ever truly free in acts of love, and if relationships are ever unpolitical.
Mentor: Anna Blasiak
José Buera is a Caribbean/Latinx writer from the Dominican Republic. His poetry has been anthologised and can be found in the Callaloo, Magma, Propel, Poetry Ireland, Southword, Wasafiri, and elsewhere. José is the founder and curator of Empanada Poetry Salon, a bimestrial gathering of diaspora poets amidst their foods.
The Cutting takes its name from a forgotten massacre — El Corte, Kout Kouto-a — in which Rafael Trujillo’s regime murdered thousands of Haitians and dark-skinned Dominicans on the border between two nations sharing one island. Written across English, Spanish, and Kreyòl, and travelling through Taíno legacy and Vodou ritual, poems trace how a dictatorship’s violence hardened into a national identity built on negation and the difficult work of recovering what was lost.
Mentor: Bryan Cheyette
Sonia Grant is an independent scholar, with an emphasis on social and cultural history, She is also primarily engaged as a non-fiction writer. An avid researcher, her main areas of interest are explorations of themes encompassing “hidden histories, untold stories and marginalised voices.”
Black Britannia: 1919-1939 chronicles civilian British subjects, men of colour, in Germany during WWI, who were interned at Ruhleben Camp. With the war over and the men repatriated to Britain, the book examines the emerging communities and how these outliers formed [preceding Windrush in 1948], the nucleus of multicultural Britain.
Mentor: Elizabeth McCracken
Josephine Jay has written for the Sunday Times Magazine, Grazia, Gal-dem, Extra Teeth, Snack Magazine and regularly writes for the Skinny. She is lead author of On Adult Adoptive Identities and has been shortlisted for the Kavya New Writing Prize, Jessica George Bursary, Moniack Mhor Emerging Writers Award and was awarded the Eilean Shona Scholarship in 2023.
Her short story collection blends the mythopoetic with explorations of identity, family, motherhood, displacement and love in the modern age. These look at how ghosts, myths and monsters follow in our footsteps and give form to fears.
Mentor: Griselda Pollock
Eva Miller is a cultural historian and writer living in London, where she also works in breastfeeding support for local councils. She earned her doctorate in Assyriology at the University of Oxford, and her research since has explored the ancient past, its modern reception, museums, and history of science.
Eva Miller’s nonfiction project Baby Pictures, is a cultural history exploring how new technologies for envisioning conception, pregnancy, and birth have shaped our understandings of some of the most intimate and meaningful experiences of our lives, and our sense of what it means to be a mother and a human.
Mentor: Claudia Gold
Franz Alexander Neumayer – is an Australian born philosophy & classics graduate (1st class hons), as well as hairdresser from London. A self-described amateur anthropologist, his work in investigative memoir spans diverse archives and institutions across Europe, shining a personal light on people and their experiences across conflict. He lives in Hackney.
Franz’s project (Working title – F. X. Neumayer) explores a buried family relationship becomes an epic of tragedy, war and what we lose when we lose our connection. A German father, his English son, and a warning out of history. This is that tale, and a record of events and mysteries still so important in our own time.
Mentor: Malika Booker
Jessica Peng is a poet living in London. She holds a BA in English from UCL and an MA in Creative Writing from Goldsmiths. Her work has been published in Octagon Poetry and Goldfish.
‘Chinese Rooms’ is Jessica Peng’s debut pamphlet. Riffing on the Orientalist concept of a ‘Chinese Room’, these poems move between art, history, cinema, desire, education, family and travel. They explore Chinese heritage and British Chinese identity, as well as the onus of needing to explore one’s identity at all.
Mentor: Emma Darwin
Hannah Tobin Cohen is usually found writing stories, developing properties, or commandeering laundry duty so she can listen to her audiobook. She holds a BA from Oxford and an MA in English and Creative Writing. In 2025, Hannah won Bar-Ilan University’s fiction prize once and lost her keys seven times.
“Dreams, Schemes & Custard Creams in Wartime Pontypridd” is a melanchomic love story perfect for romantics, foodies, and historical fiction fans. Devour it whole, as a novel, or savour it slowly, as a collection of six, linked short stories, each inspired by a recipe from a different corner of the world.
