The Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize 2026

About the prize

The Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction is the UK’s longest running prize for comic fiction and is designed to highlight the funniest novel of the past twelve months, which best evokes the Wodehouse spirit of witty characters and perfectly timed comic prose. The prize was launched in 2000 on the 25th anniversary of the death of P.G. Wodehouse and 2025 marked the 25th anniversary of the award. Each year, the prize celebrates the novels that have genuinely made people laugh. Publishers are advised to focus their submissions for 2026 on books that really made them laugh out loud, in order to give them the best chance of being shortlisted.

Our 2026 Shortlist

A Good Person by Kirsten King – Published by Fleet (Little, Brown)

Lillian is having a great time with Henry: he's charming, well-educated, and exactly the kind of guy she'd like to end up with. That is, until she stays the night at his flat and they end up in a huge argument. Furious, Lillian seeks revenge on Henry by performing a drunken YouTube hex on him. But then Henry actually ends up dead. Desperate to control the narrative, clear her name, and assume her rightful place as Henry's mourning girlfriend, Lillian's pursuit of the truth will throw her into a dangerous tailspin, which just may just upend her life for good.

Stephanie Merritt said: “A wickedly funny reinvention of the revenge-plot comedy, with a gloriously deluded narrator. As you'd expect from a screenwriter, Kirsten King has a killer ear for dialogue, and so many of her lines made me laugh out loud.”

Black Bag by Luke Kennard – Published by John Murray Press

A penniless and out-of-work actor picks up a job working for Dr Blend, a university professor who is conducting a psychological experiment. How will Dr Blend's students react to someone zipped into on oversized bag, sitting at the back of the lecture hall over a series of autumn term lectures? The role, eagerly accepted, soon has unexpected consequences. A professor of post-humanism develops research questions of her own, in particular if you can love someone secreted away inside a black bag. Meanwhile, the actor's childhood friend and flatmate forms a vision for monetising this new situation… A warped campus novel, Black Bag is an investigation into the crisis of masculinity and an off-kilter love story.

Tristram Fane Saunders said: “Luke Kennard's utterly original campus novel nudges at serious questions - about art, authenticity and modern masculinity - but always with a light touch. It's a novel that achieves a marvellous balance between the mundane and the surreal.”

How To Lose a Lord in Ten Days by Sophie Irwin – Published by HarperCollins

He wants a wife. She wants to be jilted. This is war. Rich, handsome and titled, Lord Ashford has every lady in England longing for his hand in marriage. Everyone, that is, except Miss Lydia Hanworth – the only young woman Ashford wishes to marry. Pressured into accepting Ashford’s proposal, the announcement must be kept secret for ten days. Can Lydia free herself from her obligations before the engagement is publicly announced, without ruining her reputation? You can achieve an awful lot in ten days, after all…

Sophie Ratcliffe said: “Packed full of dukes, dowries, and double-edged wit, Irwin’s Regency spin on the classic romcom charmed the judges with its sly humour and period detail.”

Motherfaker by Anna Brook-Mitchell – Published by Macmillan

Barri Brown is a respected teacher and an upstanding citizen of Guernsey. She’s also down for a bit of law-breaking… At thirty-five, Barri spends her time slaving away as a teacher, getting passed over for promotions and constantly covering for colleagues with kids. When her husband vanishes – along with her savings – it’s the final straw. And so, she hatches a wild plan: fake a pregnancy and use the paid maternity leave to start over somewhere new. With seven foam bumps, a wardrobe full of smock dresses and a great pregnancy heist underway, all Barri has to do is blag it until she can disappear for good – without getting caught and being sent to prison for fraud. How hard could it be?

Tristram Fane Saunders said: “Could you fake a pregnancy just for the paid maternity leave – and get away with it? This outrageous, harebrained scheme is an irresistible premise for Anna Brook-Mitchell's farce, in which one lie soon leads into another. It's a warm, bighearted farce with a heroine you can't help rooting for.”

Offseason by Avigayl Sharp - Published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson (Orion Publishing Group)

In Offseason, the fiercely observant but self-deluded narrator finds herself teaching at an all-girls boarding school in a remote coastal town. In between manic lectures that veer from Charles Dickens's Bleak House to the childhood maltreatment of her beloved Iosif Stalin and the generational legacy of the Holocaust, she implicates everyone she meets in her quest to pin down where exactly her own life went wrong.

Stephanie Merritt said: “'Wry, deadpan, absurdist: Offseason perfectly skewers the self-absorption of contemporary life (and fiction) and finds comedy in the bleakest situations. It feels fresh, original and multi-layered; I loved its strangeness and dark humour.”

We Love You, Bunny by Mona Awad – Published by Scribner UK (Simon & Schuster)

This is the highly anticipated follow up to the viral sensation Bunny. When We Love You, Bunny opens, Samantha Heather Mackey has just published her first novel to critical acclaim. But at a New England stop on her book tour, her one-time frenemies, furious at the way they’ve been portrayed, kidnap her. Now a captive audience, it’s her (and our) turn to hear the Bunnies’ side of the story. One by one, they take turns holding the axe, and recount the birth throes of their unholy alliance, their discovery of their unusual creative powers ― and the phantasmagorical adventure of conjuring their first creation.

James Naughtie said: “Mona Awad's horror-satire crackles with the same edgy pulse that made her first Bunny novel a phenomenon - exploring ruthlessly the social mayhem of a group of privileged Ivy League student women. Funny, bloody and irresistible.”

The shortlist was chosen from a record 119 submissions, published between 1 June 2025 and 31 May 2026. The winner will be announced at a reception on 30th November in London.

Our 2025 Winner

Rosanna Pike won the 2025 Bollinger Everyman Prize for Comic Fiction for A Little Trickerie (published by Fig Tree, Penguin Random House). Judge Pippa Evans said: “Rosanna Pike is so very playful with her use of language in this joyful and unctuous book. I fell in love with Tibb from the very first page and giggled right to the end.” Judge James Naughtie said: “Silky and effervescent, it bubbles with wit and style”.