“Winning Discoveries and becoming a mother are so tangled up with each other it’s been impossible to unknot the two.”

Emma van Straaten won the inaugural Discoveries Award in 2021, the week after the birth of her first child. Now, almost four years later and a mother of two, Emma is about to publish her debut novel, This Immaculate Body. Here she reflects on her publishing process, achieving her dreams as she navigated early motherhood, and the community she found through the Discoveries programme.

I hold a copy of This Immaculate Body in my hands, and I can’t get over the newness, the bookishness of it. The first line, one I know by heart, looks real and proper, like a real, proper writer wrote it. Somehow that writer is me. I can’t stop flipping through the pages, and looking at my name. The first words were written as part of a short story years ago, and had grown to a 40,000 word manuscript by the time I entered the Women’s Prize Discoveries Programme in 2021. People say that writing is lonely, and it can be – but Discoveries has turned this often solitary journey into a beautiful community.

Notwithstanding the pandemic (which, for all it took away, replaced my commute with two hours of daily writing time), I found out I had been shortlisted for Discoveries the week I gave birth to my first daughter. I received the news with something close to numbness, joy and disbelief shimmering through, my world having already irrevocably shifted with the arrival of a tiny scrunched newborn: Coco. Then, incredibly, hormone-sodden and a bit of a wreck, I learned that I had won. And, what’s more, I had won an almost unbelievable prize: representation from Lucy Morris at Curtis Brown (and £5k which I hoarded, untouched, for a year and a half then spent all at once on laser eye surgery). Flipping through the list of ideal agents that I had written the previous year, I found Lucy Morris’s name at the top, underlined, and with a flurry of stars next to it signifying: this is the dream. It seemed inconceivable that Lucy wanted to represent me, and in those early days of motherhood I wondered if perhaps I had written it into being. A three-week old Coco and I had an initial Zoom with Lucy in which she spoke of a writing career, what a book deal might look like, translations, world rights, film rights, casually mentioning a second book, a third, a fifth. It was exciting and overwhelming; when I reread my notes from the meeting it was like reading them for the first time. After many months had passed and I began to feel human again, Lucy and I worked together in earnest to knead and stretch and nourish my 40,000 word manuscript into a larger, richer loaf.

In the meantime, the Discoveries cohort grew, and the 2022 longlist welcomed me into their WhatsApp fold while I ploughed through draft after draft, several of them becoming amongst my very first readers. Then, when I was pregnant with my second daughter: my manuscript, still called Heartstring at this point, was sent out to publishers, the first time it had been read more widely, by people I didn’t know. It enjoyed a four-way auction for rights which was bizarre to experience – my writing, thoughts from my head which had been written in pyjamas, or on a phone note on the bus, had become something of monetary as well as artistic value. The manuscript was bought by Fleet in the UK, and Harper Perennial in the US, and intense editing began with my editors, Rhiannon and Edie, leading towards a non-negotiable deadline: the due date of my second child. I handed in my structural edits a couple of days before I went into labour. Baby Goldie arrived, with little skinny legs and blue eyes, and initially napped well but unpredictably. Although, six months later, I know I edited a lot, and was still writing fresh material during the first months of her life, I couldn’t truthfully tell you I remember doing it. Then – more editing, title changes, covers, copyediting, typesetting, proofreading, proof copies – and here we are.

Winning Discoveries and becoming a mother are so tangled up with each other it’s been impossible to unknot the two. Rhiannon and Fleet sent life-affirming brownies to my house after I had my second baby, and Lucy sent presents for me and the girls. Goldie has met (and enchanted) my agent, my editor, and Claire Shanahan, the Executive Director of the Women’s Prize, as well as the winners of Discoveries 2022 and 2023, Sui and Paige. What was the prize, ultimately? It was, and is, this community, this battalion of women, my team – and Coco, and Goldie. I hope it will be my readers too.

We’re so proud to have played a part in Emma’s writing journey! Feeling inspired? Discoveries will open for submissions again later this month – to find out more, visit the Discoveries homepage.