Scotsman Fringe First awards: our first winners of 2026 revealed

Since then, the Fringe Firsts have helped to launch countless careers. Notable past winners range from Rowan Atkinson, Stephen Fry, and Billy Connolly to Phoebe Waller-Bridge (with the original stage version of Fleabag) and Richard Gadd (for Baby Reindeer).

This year the awards are sponsored by Queen Margaret University Edinburgh, and we are very grateful to them for supporting us to continue seeing the hundreds of eligible shows premiering across the Fringe’s many venues. We are also very grateful to the Pleasance for hosting our three weekly award ceremonies - the third of which, on Friday 28 August, is a public event at the Pleasance Grand where you can also find out the winners of other prizes presented by the Brighton Fringe, the Adelaide Fringe, the Mental Health Foundation and more.

HOW IT WORKS

The Fringe Firsts recognise outstanding new writing premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe. Shows in the theatre, dance & physical theatre, and musicals & opera sections are eligible, and winners are announced on each Friday of the Fringe.

There is no set number of winners each week. Shows are nominated by The Scotsman’s team of critics, and winners are then decided on by a highly experienced judging panel consisting of, this year, our chief theatre critic Joyce McMillan (as chair) plus writers Susan Mansfield, Mark Fisher, Sally Stott, David Pollock, Fiona Shepherd, Jackie McGlone and Fergus Morgan.

This week we are delighted to announce our first six winners of 2026.

THE BRIDGE (Assembly Roxy, 7.40pm, until 16 August)

What we said: “Anyone who enjoyed last year’s breakout Fringe hit The Horse of Jenin will love The Bridge, also by Palestinian playwright, performer and stand-up comedian Alaa Shehada. Although this solo production is a little less in-your-face, less cruising on madcap energy, it again presents a Palestinian slice of life with warmth, character and humour, while still outlining the shocking realities of life in the West Bank. While The Bridge deftly details a very specific place and situation, it also outlines the symptoms of a wider border anxiety in our world.” (David Pollock)

MAYFLIES (Brown’s of Leith, 4pm, until 30 August)

What we said: “Edinburgh’s brilliant site-specific theatre specialists Grid Iron tackle the subject of mortality in characteristic style, opening up a fabulous old warehouse space on The Shore for their new staging of Andrew O’Hagan’s acclaimed 2020 book Mayflies, a love story about the profound friendship between two men, Tully and Jimmy, who grew up together in a working-class Ayrshire town, and are bonded forever by their intense shared teenage experiences in music and culture. When, 30 years on, Tully calls Jimmy to say that he has had a terminal diagnosis, and that he wants help in arranging to end his own life, Jimmy feels compelled to step up. Mayflies offers an almost flawless evocation of O’Hagan’s beautifully told story about the gentler rhythms of male friendship, in an age when traditional masculinity is often viewed as toxic.” (Joyce McMillan)

THE SINGER (Traverse Theatre, various times, until 30 August)

What we said: “The Singer is a Glasgow story about a young Deaf man, played by Jamie Rea, who has always had a profound response to music - which he experiences as rhythm and beats, using a special amplifying back-pack - and whose life begins to change when he meets struggling musician and songwriter... As the story evolves, it becomes clear that Jamie’s huge gift as a performer - signing and dancing his way through the lyrics and music of his and Andy’s songs - has the power to transform their lives, and to redeem them both; and if the show’s ending has an element of fairytale about it - well, why not, in a joyful production full of screens, sounds and technical complexities beautifully co-ordinated, and placed entirely at the service of a human story both remarkable and inspiring, and full of heart, body and soul.” (Joyce McMillan)

TOAST (Summerhall, 12.10pm, until 16 August)

What we said: “No Fringe would be complete without a play about the difficulties of putting on a play at the Fringe. While this sparkly written comic-tragic show, by writer and performer Jude Green, starts off with the familiar frustrations of a call to a disembodied voice in the Job Centre, it quickly expands into a critique of a system designed to channel everyone into an outdated notion of traditional jobs with no room for individuality or creativity in defining what a job is or could be. It’s a play for anyone’s who’s trapped by the choices they’ve been forced to make and dared to dream of something better.” (Sally Stott)

SUPPOSING: (Traverse Theatre, various times, until 30 August)

What we said: “If the Western world is currently living through the strangest of moments - a bizarre mix of the apocalyptic, the self-absorbed, and the frantically busy everyday - then no poet or theatre-maker captures that crisis, and its impact on women, more vividly than the brave and remarkable Zinnie Harris. Her latest play, Supposing, tells the tale of Sally is a middle-class wife, mother and manager in her 40s who one day falls into a hole in the street outside the local theatre, and emerges a changed woman. She is haunted by visions, premonitions, and a need to give warnings to those affected, The poetry of Harris’s writing gleams and hallucinates ever more brilliantly as the play unfolds, while every aspect of her own production comes together to support it. And when two new presences appear on stage, towards the end, it seems like a sign that the new world in which Sally now lives is full not only of horrors, but also of unexpected moments of beauty, as surprising as they are wonderful.” (Joyce McMillan)

BIGFOOT RIPPED MY DOG IN HALF I SAW IT (Summerhall

What we said: “In Xhloe and Natasha’s new work, these two remarkable writer-performers take just an hour to create a community that seems like a near-perfect metaphor for the current state of America, and for much of western world. Bereft for months of drinkable running water after a traumatic flood, the town is already stressed and on edge when two teenagers start to spin their tale of a gigantic creature in the headlights, frightening them off the road. The central thrust of this brilliantly conceived story soon becomes all too clear, in what must be one of the sharpest, most significant, and most breathtakingly executed physical theatre shows of the year.” (Joyce McMillan)

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