Lucy Steeds has won the 2025 Waterstones debut fiction prize for her novel The Artist, which has been praised for its “atmospheric, sensory prose.”
Set in an artist’s household in 1920s Provence, the novel follows aspiring English journalist Joseph Adelaide, reclusive painter Edouard Tartuffe and his niece Ettie, who has her own hidden artistic ambitions.
“With lavish, luxurious description, Steeds evokes the sensory environment: the smell of hot earth, the sound of crickets, sunlight on soft yellow stones, ‘a constellation of fireflies … spreading and regrouping like a net of stars,’” wrote Christobel Kent in a Guardian review of the novel.
“Her characterisation too is vivid and sure-footed: the anguished Joseph, the fiercely determined Ettie, and at the centre of his shadowy lair, the great tortured brute Tata – half Cyclops, half Minotaur – each of them groping towards artistic expression.”
Steeds will receive £5,000 and a “promise of ongoing commitment” to her writing career. The Artist was selected from a shortlist of six books which also featured Confessions by Catherine Airey, Saraswati by Gurnaik Johal, Ordinary Saints by Niamh Ní Mhaoileoin, Sunstruck by William Rayfet Hunter, and When the Cranes Fly South by Lisa Ridzén.
The winner was chosen by a panel of booksellers informed by votes and feedback from more than 650 booksellers from Waterstones shops.
Bea Carvalho, head of books at Waterstones, said Steeds’ novel “stood out for its atmospheric, sensory prose, and its headily evocative sense of time and place.
“This is a gorgeously claustrophobic novel to be fully swept away by: The Artist has something for readers of all tastes and heralds the arrival of an exciting new voice. We can’t wait to see what Lucy Steeds does next.”
Steeds, who is originally from north London, began writing the novel while living in France. Commenting on the inspiration behind the novel, she said she was “fascinated by the concept of art monsters. These tyrannical figures who act abominably to the people around them in order to create great art.
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“I was less interested in the art we’ve gained from these monsters, and more interested in the art we’ve lost. What could have been created if these tyrants weren’t crushing everyone around them?”
Waterstones launched the prize in 2022, celebrating the best work of debut fiction written in any form. Previous winners of the prize include Alice Winn and Ferdia Lennon, who won last year for his novel Glorious Exploits, which went on to win the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse prize and The Authors’ Club 2025 best first novel award.