In the UK’s National Year of Reading, Airbnb will partner with arts charity Hay Festival to launch Room to Write – a new writing award. Open to UK-based writers, the award offers eight recipients an Airbnb coupon worth £1,500, enabling them to stay in a UK location of their choosing to support focused writing. Free to enter.
Rooted in Hay Festival’s commitment to nurturing contemporary writing and Airbnb’s mission to enable meaningful travel and connection, Room to Write champions creativity and the importance of place and space in storytelling.
Developed with Hay Festival to support writers at a critical stage in their career, the Room to Write award recognises that time, space, and a change of environment are essential to fuel creativity and often inaccessible due to financial or personal constraints.
Eligibility
• UK-based published writers of fiction or non-fiction or poetry aged 18+
• Published writers in the early stages of their careers who are seeking time, space, and support to begin building a sustainable professional pathway
• Published mid-career writers who may be encountering creative, financial, or structural challenges with their next publication and would benefit from focused support to progress their work
• Established and published writers who feel they have reached a natural limit within a particular genre, form, or language, and who face barriers in achieving a meaningful step change in their practice
• Applications will be assessed on the strength of the proposed work and the impact that dedicated time and a change of environment could have on the writer’s work, rather than on career stage alone.
How to Apply
Please fill out the digital application form.
The application will ask for the following:
• Please provide a description of your work and explain how a change of place or space will support its development (Max: 500 words)
• A short writing sample (Max: 500 words)
• Brief writer biography (Max: 200 words).
Find out more here
Deadline: Sunday 31 May 2026 at 12pm