Martin Wills team hope awards will survive in a new form

Organisers of the Martin Wills Writing Awards have launched 2017's 25th staging of the annual competition with the announcement that its anniversary year will also be the last in its current guise.

The awards, created to encourage and reward fine writing on a horseracing theme by young people, were established in 1993 to commemorate Martin Wills, an amateur jockey and journalist, who died in April 1992, aged 39.

Wills's close family have been passionate about the awards over the near quarter-century that has followed but believe now is the right time to end their involvement and, they hope, pass on the baton to others.