QUEERANTINE WATTYS SHORTLIST

SHORTLISTED WATTYS 2026
This is normal. This is platonic.

My best friend is sitting on my lap. My roommate is asleep in the next room. Amsterdam is in lockdown. And I am fine.

I am not fine.

Jill Wijntuin is a 25-year-old spoken word poet with no stage, no income, and a five-year crush on the very straight best friend she should have gotten over years ago. Then her ceiling floods, her room becomes unlivable, and she ends up in her roommate Tara's bed.

Tara is not part of the plan. Tara is weird and dramatic and dangerously comfortable with personal space. She keeps looking at Jill like she can see something Jill is trying very hard not to say out loud.

Locked inside a Jordaan apartment with one crush she needs to survive and one roommate she absolutely should not want, Jill makes three emergency plans:

Plan A: survive lockdown without losing her mind.
Plan B: stop being in love with her very straight best friend.
Plan C: avoid Tara at all costs.

Unfortunately, Tara lives here.

#2 Lesbian romance
#13 Slowburn
#1 Quarantine
#4 Lesbianfiction
#1 Amsterdam
#5 queerromance