The Black List recently announced the seven winners of its inaugural Unpublished Novel Award, introducing the world to seven writers across various genres from children’s and young adult fiction to adult crime, horror, and literary fiction.
Debutiful recently chatted with all seven winners and is excited to introduce the world to each writer, discover why and how they write, and learn more about the book that won them the award.
Meet Rua Morrow, winner of the Thriller & Suspense award for her manuscript, Pressure. Morrow is an Irish-American novelist who writes about climate science and the human psyche. In August 2025, Pressure was also a finalist in the Best Suspense category of the Killer Nashville Claymore Awards, which honor the best unpublished first fifty pages of a manuscript.
We asked Morrow to give readers a brief insight into his writing life and her Unpublished Novel Award-winning manuscript, Pressure.
Can you introduce readers to who you are as a writer and what interests and informs your writing?
I write fiction shaped by climate science and psychology, where environmental forces are not just setting but active participants in the story. I’m drawn to large-scale crises—solar storms, wildfires, rising seas—and to how those impersonal systems bear down on intimate human lives. My work explores the tension between global collapse and the interior of the mind and body, asking what it means to live, love, and survive inside forces much larger than ourselves.
The announcement over at Lit Hub gave a quick preview of what your book is, but I always like to ask the writer what their book is really about. So, what’s your book?
The book begins as an apocalyptic disaster: a sudden loss of air, a population-crushing event survived by few. But, as it unfolds, that initial catastrophe gives way to new, more intimate crises. What starts as a collective emergency becomes something harder to escape: the realization that the real crisis is internal.
The novel is about what happens when the climate crisis stops being abstract and starts to live inside someone’s nervous system, when the breakdown of the world and the breakdown of a mind begin to mirror each other. At its core, it’s about the fantasy of escape, and the consequences of acting on that fantasy.
How did this story come to be? What were the highs and lows (so far) of writing it?
The story began with a simple, unsettling realization. We live with the possibility of climate catastrophe humming beneath everyday life, the sense that something could happen at any moment. The specific “what if” came to me on an airplane, during the familiar instruction to put on your own oxygen mask before helping anyone else. I realized, very clearly, that I wouldn’t. I would help my child first. That moment lodged itself in my body and became the emotional engine of the book.
In terms of the writing process, the highs have outweighed the lows. I loved taking notes on planes and in airports, translating those spaces and people into fictional places and characters. I found real pleasure in working through the science and letting it steer the plot, allowing the narrative to adjust course in response to what the science demanded. The hardest part has been trusting, chapter by chapter, that the characters will make the right choices and that the story is moving in the right direction, especially when those choices aren’t easy or reassuring.
What has this Award opened for you? Where are you in your journey now?
The award led me to sign with an excellent agent, Mollie Glick at CAA, who offered editorial feedback and, after revision, shared the manuscript with a range of publishers, resulting in several offers, one of which I accepted. While I’m working through final edits on the book, we’re also in conversation with film companies about potential options and a screenplay adaptation, another door opened by the award.
More broadly, the award opened an entirely new world. As a first-time fiction writer, much of this landscape is still unfamiliar, and that’s been unexpectedly energizing. I feel genuinely alive and reinvigorated by entering a new creative community. I’m already at work on a second and third book.
What does your writing routine and space look like?
It looks like: a mess. A lived-in one. My desk is L-shaped. One wing is usually taken over by my child and her crafts. On the other, thinner, I squeeze my computer, coffee, and notebook onto a small rotating leaf that I swing out of the way on occasion to make room for a boxing bag.
Behind me are shelves of books on a kingfisher wall, and in front of me, large windows high up in the trees, facing the sunset. It’s the opposite of a pristine writing space, but it’s one where different parts of my life—as well as the inside and outside—coexist, and that feels essential to how I work.
What can we expect from you in the future?
I’m continuing to work in the space between large-scale ecological phenomena and the interior psyche, between global systems and personal identity. My next novel focuses on rising temperatures, wildfires, and a secret surrounding a plane crash that only one survivor understands.
Beyond that, I’m developing another project shaped by lunar cycles and their pull on bodies, behavior, and perception: an exploration of how natural forces can quietly reorganize identity and fear.