A Bermudian writer who considers the craft “vital” received a £1,500 (about $1,990) Airbnb coupon through a new literary award.

Yusef Bushara was one of eight writers living in Britain who received the inaugural Room to Write Award, aimed at supporting writers as they work on new projects.

Mr Bushara, non-fiction editorial assistant at Jacaranda Books, has bachelor’s degrees in Middle Eastern political humanities and English literature and a master’s in comparative literature.

He developed a love for writing as a teenager and believes good writing leads to “more feeling readers”.

Mr Bushara explained: “I write not so much because I like it, but because it’s vital — it helps me name beauty, right from wrong and true from untrue, but mostly it gives me permission to describe the complexities of our home.”

He said Bermuda and its people would always be his favourite topics. His debut poetry collection, Good News, released last year, examines daily life on the island through his Sudanese-Bermudian heritage.

After learning of his win, Mr Bushara immediately thought of other Bermudian writers that paved the way for him and others.

He plans to use the bursary money to spend time at his home or anywhere by the sea and is working on a non-fiction piece, Terra Nullius: The Adamic Imagination in Britain’s Uninhabited Isles.

Mr Bushara said: “The book centres on a concept called the Adamic imagination. Drawing on the figure of Adam in Eden, the Adamic describes a recurring literary and cultural tendency found in historically uninhabited territories: a preoccupation with beginnings, naming, wonder, ecological intimacy and the possibility of imagining society anew.”

He hopes the work will provide a “framework for thinking about belonging, sovereignty, decolonisation and the collective construction of national consciousness in places marked by absence, where there is no pre-colonial homeland to recover”.

Mr Bushara hopes more Bermudians consider careers in publishing so that Bermuda can “build the infrastructure to publish our own writers at home”.

He explained: “In doing so, we can continue building our literary canon and, through it, help imagine and create the future that we deserve.”

He said publishing needed people with a range of “creative, technical and business skill sets” and told Bermudians interested in the field to love literature with a specificity unique to them.

He added: “Remember that a book that makes a profit will always be secondary to a book that changes a reader’s life.

“Publishing often conflates these objectives but the people who work in it should not.”