Anna by Angus Gaunt

Winner of the Finlay Lloyd 2025 20/40 prize for fiction, Angus Gaunt’s novella enters the consciousness of a teenage girl just released from a concentration camp and enjoying for a while the freedom of walking in a forest. But those precious moments mean that she misses the gathering of survivors to board the train to take them to somewhere else. It means that her siblings, and the children she has cared for, are on their way to safety whilst she is left behind, alone, until the intrusion of an equally alone boy casting off his uniform of guard but still carrying a rifle.

It doesn’t matter which concentration camp Gaunt is writing about, it’s not a work of meticulously researched historical fiction, rather it is an intense immersion in the experience of someone who has suffered and is still suffering, struggling to find her way to that other life, that normal life that is lived somewhere else in the world. Anna is starving, her bones meet her skin, but her mind exerts itself to solve each problem, to find a plan, a way to go on. She constantly pushes through exhaustion, to take each step forward in the direction she hopes is the right one.

A comment from the 20/40 judging panel succinctly describes the Gaunt’s novella as carrying the reader on ‘a journey from victimhood to self-possession’. It is a minutely described experience that submerses the reader in Anna’s ordeal but builds confidence that she has the inner strength to succeed. It’s a beautifully focussed and descriptive story, quite different from the other prize-winning works.

The Finlay Lloyd 20/40 Publishing Prize offers a publishing opportunity for fiction and non-fiction prose works between 20,000 and 40,000 words. Submissions for 2026 are open 1 December 2025 – 31 January 2026.

Themes: Survivor, Endurance, Resilience.

Helen Eddy