Sanctuary by Jacob Sparrow has been announced as the winner of the inaugural Leodis Prize, a new award established to discover and champion previously unrepresented playwrights. The prize, launched in 2025, attracted nearly 350 submissions from across the UK and beyond.
A reflective and time-shifting drama, Sanctuary explores memory, belonging and community as past and present intertwine. Inspired by real events in a Suffolk village, where plans to open an AIDS hospice in the early 1990s were met with local resistance, the play follows a man who arrives ahead of the development and forms unexpected connections with those around him.
As an unexpected encounter in the house he revisits forces him to confront memories he had suppressed and reshaped, he confronts his own mortality and the unearned privilege of surviving this far. Sanctuary examines loneliness, the legacy of shame and the absence of a clear blueprint for queer lives in time, while also illuminating moments of care, humour and hope.
Set almost entirely within the house itself, the play unfolds in a fluid, memory-like space where past and present coexist, and where storytelling becomes an act of survival. Sanctuary is a deeply human story about safety – where we find it, who is allowed it and what it means to choose to live.
Jacob Sparrow comments, I am thrilled and amazed to have won the inaugural Leodis Prize and am hugely grateful to Leodis and the judges for giving me this opportunity and seeing potential in Sanctuary. This is my first play and I wanted to write something that finds hope in queer voices whilst acknowledging the legacy of our history, and that humanity can still be found in unexpected places even when it feels as though the world is against us. I cannot wait to start work with the team to develop a fully realised production.
The Leodis Prize offers a unique opportunity for emerging writers; Sanctuary will be staged, fully funded, at the Pleasance for the 2026 Fringe. Jacob will receive representation from Leodis, a £2,000 cash prize to support his career and the play will be published by Methuen Drama (an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing).
The judging panel – comprising Tamzin Outhwaite, Jenna Fincken, Sam Yates, Lucy Casson, Sian Carter, Anthony Alderson and Daniel Hinchliffe – praised Sanctuary for its emotional depth, theatrical imagination and powerful storytelling.
Daniel Hinchliffe, Managing Director of Leodis Talent and founder of the award, comments, The shortlisted plays were all brilliant, and the judging panel and I loved reading them. Each had its own distinctive voice, and we’ve discovered some wonderful writers. But there was one play that stood out for us, and that play is Sanctuary by first time writer Jacob Sparrow. Huge congratulations to Jacob and thank you to all of the writers who entered. See you in Edinburgh!
The Leodis Prize underscores the continuing importance of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe as a space for discovery and innovation, and as a platform for the next generation of theatre-makers. Playwright Jacob Sparrow was part of the Emerging Writers Group at the Royal Court in 2025. Sanctuary marks his debut play.
Main Image: Jacob Sparrow, courtesy of Leodis
This post was last modified on April 16, 2026 8:40 am