Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award
The Sunday Times Charlotte Aitken Young Writer of the Year Award is a literary prize awarded to a British author under the age of 35 for a published work of fiction, non-fiction or poetry. It is administered by the Society of Authors[1] and has been running since 1991.[2]
History[edit]
The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award is said here to have originally run between 1991 and 2009, but there is evidence to confirm that it began twenty years earlier. At that time entries were confined to short stories and published in the newspaper itself. The 1974 winner was Charles Nicholl, who went on to become well-known for historical biographies.[3] "The Ups and The Downs" was Charles Nicholl's disturbing and humorous account of a bad LSD trip in London.
In 1999, Paul Farley's The Boy from the Chemist is Here to See You "was so well received", according to the Encyclopedia of British Writers, that "it was named Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award".[4]
It was re-invigorated with the support of literary agents Peters Fraser + Dunlop in 2015 under the new name Sunday Times / Peters Fraser + Dunlop Young Writer of the Year Award.[5]
In 2019 the University of Warwick took over as co-sponsor. The award was renamed as The Sunday Times / University of Warwick Young Writer of the Year Award.
Winners[edit]
| Year | Award | Author | Title | Publisher | Judges |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1991 | Winner | Helen Simpson | Four Bare Legs in a Bed and Other Stories | William Heinemann | |
| 1992 | Winner | Caryl Phillips | Cambridge | Bloomsbury | |
| 1993 | Winner | Simon Armitage | Xanadu: A Poem Film for Television and Kid | Bloodaxe/Faber & Faber | |
| 1994 | Winner | William Dalrymple | City of Djinns: A Year in Dehli | HarperCollins | |
| 1995 | Winner | Andrew Cowan | Pig | Michael Joseph | |
| 1996 | Winner | Katherine Pierpoint | Truffle Beds | Faber & Faber | |
| 1997 | Winner | Francis Spufford | I May Be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination | Faber & Faber | |
| 1998 | Winner | Patrick French | Liberty or Death: India's Journey to Independence and Division | HarperCollins | |
| 1999 | Winner | Paul Farley | The Boy from the Chemist is Here to See You[4] | Pan Macmillan | |
| 2000 | Winner | Sarah Waters | Affinity | Virago | |
| 2001 | Winner | Zadie Smith | White Teeth | Hamish Hamilton | |
| 2002 | No award made | ||||
| 2003 | Winner | William Fiennes | The Snow Geese | Picador Classic | |
| 2004 | Winner | Robert Macfarlane | Mountains of the Mind | Granta Books | |
| 2005 | No award made | ||||
| 2006 | No award made | ||||
| 2007 | Winner | Naomi Alderman | Disobedience | Penguin | |
| Shortlist | Horatio Clare | Running for the Hills | |||
| Rory Stewart | Occupational Hazards: My Time Governing in Iraq | ||||
| John Stubbs | John Donne: The Reformed Soul | ||||
| 2008 | Winner | Adam Foulds | The Truth about these Strange Times[6] | Weidenfeld & Nicolson | |
| Shortlist | Nikita Lalwani | Gifted | Viking | ||
| James McConnachie | The Book of Love: In Search of the Kamasutra Kama Sutra | Atlantic | |||
| Robert Mcfarlane | The Wild Places | Granta | |||
| 2009 | Winner | Ross Raisin | God's Own Country[7] | Viking | |
| Shortlist | Henry Hitchings | The Secret Life of Words: How English Became English | John Murray | ||
| Adam Foulds | The Broken Word | Cape | |||
| Edward Hogan | Blackmoor | ||||
| 2010 | No award made | ||||
| 2011 | No award made | ||||
| 2012 | No award made | ||||
| 2013 | No award made | ||||
| 2014 | No award made | ||||
| 2015 | Winner | Sarah Howe | Loop of Jade[8] | Chatto & Windus | Sarah Waters, Andrew Holgate, Peter Kemp |
| Shortlist | Ben Fergusson | The Spring of Kasper Meier | Little, Brown | ||
| Sunjeev Sahota | The Year of the Runaways | Picador | |||
| Sara Taylor | The Shore | William Heineman | |||
| 2016 | Winner | Max Porter | Grief is the Thing with Feathers | Faber & Faber | James Naughtie, Stella Tillyard, Andrew Holgate |
| Shortlist | Jessie Greengrass | An Account of the Decline of the Great Auk According to One Who Saw It | John Murray Press | ||
| Andrew McMillan | Physical | Jonathan Cape | |||
| Benjamin Wood | The Ecliptic | Simon & Schuster | |||
| 2017 | Winner | Sally Rooney | Conversations with Friends | Faber & Faber | Elif Shafak, Lucy Hughes-Hallett, Andrew Holgate |
| Shortlist | Minoo Dinshaw | Outlandish Knight: The Byzantine Life of Steven Runciman | Penguin | ||
| Claire North | The End of the Day | Orbit | |||
| Julianne Pachico | The Lucky Ones | Faber & Faber | |||
| Sara Taylor | The Lauras | Windmill | |||
| 2018 | Winner | Adam Weymouth | Kings of the Yukon: An Alaskan River Journey | Penguin | Kamila Shamsie, Susan Hill, Andrew Holgate |
| Shortlist | Laura Freeman | The Reading Cure: How Books Restored My Appetite | Weidenfeld & Nicolson | ||
| Imogen Hermes Gowar | The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock | Harvill Secker | |||
| Fiona Mozley | Elmet | Hodder & Stoughton | |||
| 2019 | Winner | Raymond Antrobus | The Perseverance[9] | Penned in the Margins | Kate Clanchy, Victoria Hislop, Andrew Holgate |
| Shortlist | Julia Armfield | Salt Slow | Pan Macmillan | ||
| Yara Rodrigues Fowler | Stubborn Archivist | Fleet | |||
| Kim Sherwood | Testament | Hachette | |||
| 2020 | Winner | Jay Bernard | Surge[10] | Chatto & Windus | Houman Barekat, Kit de Waal, Sebastian Faulks, Tessa Hadley |
| Shortlist | Catherine Cho | Inferno: A Memoir of Motherhood and Madness | Bloomsbury | ||
| Naoise Dolan | Exciting Times | Weidenfeld & Nicolson | |||
| Seán Hewitt | Tongues of Fire | Jonathan Cape | |||
| Marina Kemp | Nightingale | 4th Estate | |||
| 2021 | Winner | Cal Flyn | Islands of Abandonment: Life in the Post-Human Landscape | William Collins | Andrew O'Hagan, Tahmima Anam, Claire Lowdon, Gonzalo C. Garcia, Sarah Moss |
| Shortlist | Caleb Azumah Nelson | Open Water | Viking | ||
| Megan Nolan | Acts of Desperation | Vintage | |||
| Rachel Long | My Darling from the Lions | Pan Macmillan | |||
| Anna Beecher | Here Comes the Miracle | Weidenfeld & Nicolson | |||
| 2022 | Winner | Tom Benn | Oxblood: or, Our Ladies of the Good Death | Bloomsbury | Andrew Holgate, Johanna Thomas-Corr, Stig Abell, Mona Arshi, Oyinkan Braithwaite, Francis Spufford |
| Shortlist | Lucy Burns | Larger than an Orange | Chatto & Windus | ||
| Maddie Mortimer | Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies | Pan Macmillan | |||
| Katherine Rundell | Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne | Faber & Faber | |||
| 2023 | Winner | Tom Crewe | The New Life | Vintage | Johanna Thomas-Corr, Anne Enright, Mendez, James McConnachie, Daljit Nagra and Catriona Ward |
| Shortlist | Noreen Masud | A Flat Place: A Memoir | Hamish Hamilton | ||
| Michael Magee | Close to Home | Hamish Hamilton | |||
| Momtaza Mehri | Bad Diaspora Poems | Jonathan Cape | |||
No award was made in 2002, 2005 or 2006.[11][12]
References[edit]
- ^ "Sunday Times Charlotte Aitken Young Writer of the Year Award - The Society of Authors". 9 May 2020. Retrieved 8 February 2024.
- ^ Getting a Life by Helen Simpson powells.com
- ^ "Young Writer Of The Year Award". Peters Fraser and Dunlop (PFD). Retrieved 11 December 2015.
- ^ a b George Stade (2009). Encyclopedia of British Writers, 1800 to the Present, Volume 2. Infobase Publishing. p. 162. ISBN 978-1-4381-1689-1.
{{cite book}}: Unknown parameter|agency=ignored (help) - ^ Philip Jones (8 May 2015). "Sunday Times to relaunch Young Writer of the Year competition". The Bookseller. Retrieved 11 December 2015.
- ^ Anna Richardson, "Fork-lift driver wins Sunday Times award", The Bookseller, 8 April 2008.
- ^ Katie Allen, "Fifth time lucky for Raisin", The Bookseller, 6 April 2009.
- ^ "2015 Winner - Peters Fraser and Dunlop (PFD)". Peters Fraser and Dunlop (PFD). Retrieved 11 December 2015.
- ^ Heloise Wood, "Raymond Antrobus wins 2019 Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award", The Bookseller, 5 December 2019.
- ^ Jay Bernard wins £5,000 Young Writer of the Year Award for Surge. irishtimes.com. Retrieved 2020-12-11.
- ^ Staff Writer."And the shortlist is...", The Sunday Times, 11 March 2007.
- ^ The Society of Authors: The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year (past winners)