The full list of award-winners from the 2026 Scotsman Fringe Firsts have now been named as the Edinburgh Festival draws to a close.
One of the most sought-after prizes at the Edinburgh Fringe, the awards are the longest running at the festival having been established in 1973.
Sponsored this year by Queen Margaret University, our expert panel of judges recognise the best of new writing premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe, with the final batch of winners named on Friday, August 28.
Past Fringe First winners include Rowan Atkinson, Stephen Fry, and Billy Connolly, as well as the likes of Phoebe Waller-Bridge for the original stage version of Fleabag, and Richard Gadd for Baby Reindeer.
This year, an adaptation of Andrew O’Hagan’s acclaimed book Mayflies and a reworking of Shakespeare’s Hamlet have taken home prizes - as well as productions which are part audio drama and part installation, such as One Hundred Voices.
With the festival almost over, here is every Scotsman Fringe First award winner from 2026.
9. Salty Brine: HOW STRANGE IT IS (The Neutral Milk Hotel Show)
Another award winner from week two is Salty Brine: HOW STRANGE IT IS (The Neutral Milk Hotel Show). This production from the New York cabaret performer impressed our critic Fiona Shepherd who wrote: “When Salty Brine commits, he commits. The New York cabaret performer has been building his Living Record Collection series for over a decade, pouring love, ingenuity and erudition into his idiosyncratic theatrical mash-ups of classic literature and cult albums. HOW STRANGE IT IS celebrates In the Aeroplane Over the Sea by Neutral Milk Hotel, which was inspired in its writing by The Diary of Anne Frank. Salty has his literary connection, and not just because he kept his own florid diary in his teens and twenties. The irrepressible Salty attacks every song with dramatic alacrity, performs with his whole body, communes with the audience and ends this 90-minute exultation sweat-drenched but far from spent.” | Alan Rennie
10. SLAYERS
Corinne Salisbury won a Fringe First for SLAYERS which brings to life the all too real experiences of a mother encountering the manosphere while trying to protect her daughter from the dangers of the world. Scotsman critic Sally Stott writes: “On a trip across the Meadows, Edinburgh Mum Liane has an encounter with a strange man of the kind that many women will be familiar with; he’s creepy but in an opaque way that leaves her wondering if he was just being friendly – that is, until she finds out what he’s been posting about her online. Corinne Salisbury’s twist-filled script, performed by a mesmerising Zoe Hunter, powerfully captures Liane’s building anger at what she discovers and takes her on an empowering but also destructive journey to the heart of hatred and revenge that, it becomes clear, not only consumes strangers in the ‘manosphere’.” It’s a furious but also, at times, very funny rebuttal to sexism and misogyny, as well as a beautifully observed unpacking of human nature.” | Contributed
11. Supposing
One of our early Fringe First recipients is Zinnie Harris’ Supposing. Joyce McMillan writes: “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.” Supposing is at Traverse 2, Traverse Theatre (Venue 15) until August 30. | Scott Louden/The Scotsman
12. Tether
Tether is an international collaborative production which is described as “part ceilidh, part play, and a good night out”, which won a Fringe First award in part for the many moving elements needed to bring the story to life. Critic Joyce McMillan writes: “Co-created by the brilliant young Scottish company Wonder Fools with South Korea’s Theatre SAN, Tether is a true international co-production. Set in three time-periods between 1918 and 1970, it tells the story of young Dae Han, a Christian convert from South Korea who arrives in Glasgow in 1918 to study the Presbyterian faith, only to find the life of the city much more diverse and unruly than he expected. The high technical demands of the story - combining music, surtitles, movement, dialogue and songs - are handled with impressive skill by the whole Tether team; in a show that is full of energy, entertainment value, and real collaborative passion.” | Eoin Carey