Rintoul wins Sceptre Prize

Fiona Rintoul has won the £1,500 Sceptre Prize for emerging writers with her novel in progress Leipzig, which the judges described as "confident" and "compelling".

Rintoul was announced as the winner last week at the Aye Write literary festival in Glasgow. The awards are sponsored by Sceptre and open to members of Glasgow University's school of creative writing.

The other shortlistees were Susan Kemp's Around, Around the Ragged Road and Mary Paulson-Ellis' The Language of Flowers.

Bob McDevitt, publisher at Hodder Scotland, said: "New writing is the very life blood of our industry and courses such as the M Litt at Glasgow are providing a steady stream of fresh and exciting new voices. Our shortlisted writers this year all display the kind of talent and imagination that should see their work published in the future."

Rintoul is a freelance financial journalist who trained as a linguist. She has had short stories and poetry published in anthologies and was a former winner of an IJP British-German Journalists Exchange Bursary.

Rintoul has previously been shortlisted for the Fish Short Story Prize, longlisted for the Fish Poetry Prize and was a finalist in the 2007 Mslexia Women's Poetry Competition. In 2007 she was a runner-up in the Daily Telegraph novel-in-a-year competition and in 2008 she won the Gillian Purvis New Writing Award.