Paul Hamlyn Foundation Awards £75,000 Each to Five Composers

The Paul Hamlyn Foundation has awarded five composers grants of £75,000 each, spread across folk, improvisation, classical and genre-fluid practice. The recipients are Olivia Chaney, Bushra El-Turk, Charlotte Keeffe, Daudi Matsiko and Ayanna Witter-Johnson.

It's a deliberately wide net. One writes for the Royal Ballet and Opera, another treats trumpets as paintbrushes, and a third mostly trusts his ear over notation. What unites them is the foundation's chequebook, which is a perfectly respectable artistic principle.

Who are the five recipients?

Olivia Chaney works as a composer, singer-songwriter, instrumentalist and folk musician. Her compositions tackle the tension between tradition and modernity, inherited trauma, the relationship between nature and the inner life, and the uncanny in the everyday. In 2024 she self-released her third solo album, Circus of Desire. Her latest single, Dark Eyed Sailor, features in the 2026 cinematic release of Wuthering Heights.

Bushra El-Turk draws on her Lebanese heritage to build musical narratives that confront societal norms and surface unheard stories. Her current projects are, frankly, a logistics spreadsheet of their own:

• A commission for Lucerne Theatre
• A cello concerto commissioned by SWR Schwetzingen Festival for cellist Lionel Martin
• A commission by the European Concert Halls Organisation (ECHO)
• A stage adaptation of Ka for solo percussion and strings, with choreographer Wayne McGregor at the Royal Ballet and Opera

Her orchestral piece Mosaic was performed by the BBC Philharmonic at the BBC Proms this summer.

Charlotte Keeffe is a composer, multi-instrumentalist, bandleader and freely improvising trumpeter working at the intersection of composition, improvisation and sonic experimentation. Inspired by abstract painting, she treats her trumpets as "Sound Brushes", moving between delicacy and intensity, structure and spontaneity. Her albums on Discus Music include Right Here, Right Now (2021), ALIVE! (2023) and the forthcoming Circles (2027).

Daudi Matsiko is a British-Ugandan singer-songwriter and guitarist in the contemporary folk tradition. His practice is intuitive and centred mostly on the acoustic guitar, using alternate tunings (retuning the instrument's open strings away from standard pitch) and occasionally other instruments. He relies almost entirely on his aural skills — and, one assumes, considerable patience — to express himself through lyrics, melody and harmony.

Ayanna Witter-Johnson is a composer, singer and cellist whose genre-fluid work bridges classical composition, jazz improvisation and Afro-diasporic musical traditions. Her music explores identity, heritage and storytelling, placing voice and cello at the centre of richly textured sound worlds. She also performs internationally and presents classical music on radio and stage.

What does the money actually change?

The Paul Hamlyn Foundation's awards are unusual among composer prizes in being unrestricted — no premiere, no commission, no deliverable attached, just capital for the artist to spend as they see fit. For improvisers like Keeffe and folk writers like Matsiko, whose income rarely runs through orchestral commissioning structures, that's the point. Expect the first audible results — El-Turk's ECHO and Lucerne commissions among them — to surface over the coming seasons.