Along the Lines of Bravery by Kimi Kuo is shortlisted for the 2026 Author of Tomorrow Award, 12-15 Category. 

About Along the Lines of Bravery:

A mythical sci-fi romance centred on fate, love, and simulation, Along the Lines of Bravery follows Kasuri, a young Speaker burdened with the visions of time itself, and Massi, a renowned hunter destined for triumph, and maybe early doom. As Kasuri's foresight rebels against the laws of providence, undermining fate as she sees it, the borders between predestination and simulated reality bleed into one another. Weaved across several realities - from a hunter-gatherer community based in protohistory to a concealed lab that manages living AIs - this love story examines whether fortune is fated or can be reshaped by the stakes of love and surrender. Along the Lines of Bravery is an examination of consciousness, decision, and the high price of opposing your stars.

An interview with Kimi: 

WNSF: What is your favourite book? 

Kimi: I love to read the books that seem more like a memory and a telling: where destiny isn’t a background but a presence. This usually translates into mythological or speculative reads that play with love and inevitability like I explored in Along the Lines of Bravery. 

WNSF: Who is your favourite author? Or one who has inspired you and why? 

Kimi: The person I admire as a writer is Madeline Miller; to me, she writes mythologies as living and breathing beings-fragile and hurting and able to burst open. I also admire authors who find that space where they can weave philosophy and stories together, so the questions linger long after you’ve closed the book. 

WNSF: What is your favourite subject at school? 

Kimi: For me, literature is by far my favourite subject at school, especially if I get to take a story apart, stitch it back together, and try and work out how that was constructed. I enjoy when one sentence holds entire worlds. 

WNSF: What does ‘adventure writing’ mean to you? Why did you choose to try your hand at an adventure story? 

Kimi: I don’t just think adventure is about physical journey, or physical danger - I’m looking for uncertainty with an aim, for adventure with an objective. I wrote an adventure story because I’m drawn to characters that venture not just through lands, but through destiny, fate and future they are blind to. 

WNSF: If you could ask an author anything, what would you want to know? 

Kimi: If there’s anything I would ask any author I’m reading, I guess I would want to know if they knew the ending before they were finished writing-or if a ending only occurs at the point you were completed; when the writing finished? 

WNSF: Who would you consider one of your heroes and why? 

Kimi: My heroes are story-tellers and world builders of all sorts – a person, a group or any entity at all that I can consider ‘creator’, creating worlds so vivid and tangible for a few seconds that they become more of reality than actual reality; be it a creator in terms of world building a universe in which to create art, of writers, artists, architects etc.

WNSF: What is the most adventurous thing you would like to do, or place you would like to visit and why? 

Kimi: My most adventurous trip, I can only imagine as being somehow to one of those places untouched, real and true from history in order to experience the time, and the environment (nature and fate are so interwoven) not from an observatory point, but as an integrated piece of it to feel the living force of nature, and destiny.

WNSF: Where do you find inspiration for your stories? 

Kimi: I am inspired by the mythology of disparate cultures, philosophical questions of free will versus fate and by the area where stories and science intersect-where science might explain superstition, but it doesn’t have to dismantle magic, think simulation theories and premonition and memory as time travel. 

WNSF: If you could time travel, where would you go and why? 

Kimi: If I could hop aboard a time machine for any visit, my trip would be to a moment, ever so slight, before history, or mythology, played out in a way I already know the conclusion of; only to experience it from the inside and truly wonder if fate always seems so immovable from outside.

WNSF: What three words would you use to describe your story? 

Kimi: The three words to describe my story: Fated. Lyrical. Unraveling.

WNSF: Congratulations on your brilliant story, and good luck for the next stage of the competition!