We’re delighted to partner with UOM’s Centre for New Writing to bring you two Women’s Prize shortlisted writers, Marcia Hutchinson and Rozie Kelly, for an evening to discuss and celebrate their novels The Mercy Step and Kingfisher.

About The Mercy Step

Set in 1960s Bradford, The Mercy Step follows Mercy, a precocious young child facing a world far too big for her small body. She lives with her Windrush-generation parents in a crowded household where her mother’s attention is stretched between church and family, and her father’s temper is something to be endured or avoided. Feeling like an outsider within her own home, Mercy retreats into books and the companionship of her beloved doll, Dolly, while learning early how to navigate the flaws and failings of the adults around her. Yet Mercy is nothing if not resilient. Armed with humour, style and fierce imagination, she quietly begins to plot her escape from a traumatic childhood. Raw and deeply affecting, Mercy’s story is one of Black British culture, childhood, family and survival in 1960s Britain.

About Kingfisher

When a creative writing academic becomes infatuated with his colleague – the poet – it is not long before it begins to threaten his relationship with his partner, Michael. Michael is beautiful. Michael is safe. But the poet is everything he isn’t; she has everything he wants. While he writes about steel and sex, she dreams about the movements of swallows. While he tends to his budding career, she writes from her big, white house in the woods. As he slips between his old life and this new one, his fixation grows into something more powerful. The poet, his Kingfisher, is his sole focus. He is hypnotised. But when simultaneous illnesses threaten to destroy the precarious reality he clings to, he’s forced to question what he can and cannot take from someone. This is a novel about grief, power and desire – and the tangles in between that make up a life.

About the authors:

Marcia Hutchinson is an award-winning publisher, lawyer, community activist and former Labour Councillor who became a full-time writer aged sixty. After growing up in Bradford and studying at Oxford University (the first pupil from her school to do so), Marcia worked in law before founding educational publishing company Primary Colours and was awarded an MBE for services to Cultural Diversity in 2010. She is the co-author with Kate Griffin (under the pseudonym Lila Cain) of the critically acclaimed historical fiction novel The Blackbirds of St Giles (Simon & Schuster, 2025). The Mercy Step is Marcia’s first solo novel, which was named an Observer Best Debut of 2025, shortlisted for the 2026 Women’s Prize for Fiction and won the Discover Book of the Year at the 2026 British Book Awards.

Rozie Kelly is a novelist based in West Yorkshire. After reading English Literature and Creative Writing she moved to Hebden Bridge, where she works for the Arvon Foundation, hosting creative writing courses. She was shortlisted for the PFD Queer Fiction Prize 2023 and was one of the eight participants in the inaugural Prototype Development Programme 2024. She won the 2024 NorthBound Book Award for Kingfisher, her debut novel, also shortlisted for the 2026 Women’s Prize for Fiction.