ADANNAY Wins Best Newcomer at the Rural Touring Awards 2026

We're thrilled to share that ADANNAY has been named Best Newcomer at the Rural Touring Awards 2026, presented in June at the National Rural Touring Forum's annual conference.

The award recognises her show Home Is Where You Make It, a confessional, multimedia performance exploring queerness, identity and belonging in the context of the Windrush Generation and its legacies. Live music sat alongside archival audio, footage and storytelling from ADANNAY. 

But this wasn't your usual tour. Across 2025 and 2026, ADANNAY took the show to village halls and community spaces in tiny towns and villages across the South West of England. It was done in partnership with Take Art, the Somerset-based initiative bringing incredible experiences of the arts to rural communities.

The Rural Touring Awards exist to recognise innovation, dedication and quality within the rural touring sector, celebrating the artists, promoters, venues and schemes that keep live performance thriving far beyond the major venues and city circuits. ADANNAY was nominated in the Best Newcomer category following her run of shows, and collected the prize at June's awards ceremony.

For ADANNAY, the tour was as meaningful as the award. "I had beautiful conversations with some wonderful people. After every show, people spoke to me about their own stories of migration, identity, home-finding. Assuming people don't want to engage, or wouldn't be interested because of differences in life experience, geography and demographic, is something I was guilty of and nervous about — but I couldn't have been more wrong."

Huge congratulations to ADANNAY, and thank you to Take Art, the NRTF, and every village hall, volunteer promoter and audience member who made the tour what it was.