Leodis Prize Winner

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.

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).

When: 5th – 31st August 2026 (not 17th) 

Where: Pleasance Dome (Ace Dome), Bristo Square, Edinburgh, EH8 9A

Tickets: available from www.pleasance.co.uk