Announcing the Winner of the 2025 Working Class Writers Grant
The Speculative Literature Foundation is pleased to announce that Nancy Omondi is the winner of the 2025 Working Class Writers Grant!
Since 2013, the Working Class Writers Grant has been awarded annually to speculative fiction writers who are working class, blue-collar, financially disadvantaged, or homeless, who have been historically underrepresented in speculative fiction due to financial barriers which make it hard to access the writing world.
Omondi’s winning piece is Chalk Dust.
Nancy Omondi is a Kenyan speculative fiction writer whose work is defined by atmosphere and emotional restraint. She is drawn to stories where the ordinary world carries an undercurrent of unease and where tension gathers quietly beneath the surface.
Her fiction often centers young narrators navigating spaces shaped by authority, silence and unspoken expectations. Rather than spectacle, she favors subtle shifts in perception, allowing speculative elements to emerge gradually from the emotional lives of her characters. Through careful attention to mood and inferiority, she explores themes of grief, power, class and belonging.
Nancy holds a degree in Marketing and is currently working on a novel set in a boarding school where discipline, myth and adolescence intersect. She is committed to crafting fiction that unsettles gently yet lingers, asking difficult questions without offering easy answers.
Wow. I heard of this news through the Locus page on Instagram and jumped up in delight! A Kenyan science fiction writer whose work has merited international recognition. What a delight! It gives me hope that there is still a place for not only speculative fiction, but specifically SFF. Most books and resources around are only to be found in used-item and second-hand stores, but we always cherish what we find, which most of the time, are old and timeless classics. Readers here are reluctant to indulge in this genre, but the tides are slowly turning.
Congratulations to Nancy. I will now have to scour every corner to get my hands on her work.