Ottoline Farrant takes the chair

Some changes to the panel for Round 2027 are worth telling you about before applications open. Ottoline Farrant, a novelist who has sat on the panel since the beginning, will chair it. She takes over from Basil Nwosu‑Hart, who steps down from the chair but stays on as a member, which we are glad about.

Joss Delaney‑Park and Mirela Costin join the panel this year. Joss makes furniture in a one-person workshop, and Mirela prints and binds books by hand. Between them they widen the set of reading habits that applications meet. The full list is on the panel page, with a short note on each member.

The panel stays at five people so that every application gets two careful readings. We have tried larger groups and found that more voices did not make the reading better. It made it shorter for each person, and short readings miss things. Two people reading closely beats five reading quickly.

Round 2027 opens on Monday 5 October. This time we will award six fellowships of $12,000 each, up from three in earlier rounds, because the endowment has grown. Ottoline has asked us to pass on one request: she would like to read proposals that say plainly what the applicant will do on a Tuesday in July.