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20 March 2024

Tom Crewe wins The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award 2024

Debut novelist Tom Crewe has been named winner of the Sunday Times Charlotte Aitken Young Writer of the Year Award for The New Life (Chatto & Windus), a novel described by judge James McConnachie as “thrillingly intimate” and “a compassionate and tenderly sensual account of masculine sexuality”. 

The New Life is set in 1894 while the Oscar Wilde trial is igniting public outcry, “and everything John and Henry have longed for is suddenly under threat,” the synopsis says. “United by a shared vision, the two begin work on a revolutionary book arguing for the legalisation of homosexuality.” 

Judge Johanna Thomas-Corr, chief literary critic for the Times and Sunday Times, said: “Sometimes a début novel comes along that feels like an immediate classic – a book that you suddenly can’t imagine not existing. If you’ve read Tom Crewe’s bold and beautifully observed début, The New Life, you’ll know that it is just such a book. He is a writer of rare promise.”

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20 March 2024

Paul Murray wins inaugural Nero Gold Prize Book of the Year 2024

Paul Murray has won the £30,000 inaugural Nero Gold Prize Book of the Year for The Bee Sting (Hamish Hamilton), described as “a gripping saga of one highly dysfunctional family that asks if a single moment of bad luck – a patch of ice on the road, a bee caught beneath a bridal veil – can change the direction of a life”. Chair of judges Bernardine Evaristo presented Murray with the prize, describing The Bee Sting as a “wonderfully ambitious and entrancing novel about a family imploding, against a background of Ireland’s economic and social crisis of the late Noughties”.  

Receiving the award Paul Murray said: "what an incredible honour, I’m really speechless" and, visibly emotional, dedicated the award to his father, who is unwell at the moment and wasn’t able to make the ceremony. He told journalists: "It’s the first Nero Prize [...] so there will never be another first winner, so that’s really wonderful and it’s a tremendous honour."

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20 March 2024

Anne Enright wins Writers' Prize for Fiction 2024

Anne Enright has won the fiction category in this year’s Writers’ Prize, formerly the Rathbones Folio Prize, at a ceremony at the London Book Fair for The Wren, The Wren (Jonathan Cape), a meditation on love and the love between mother and daughter – sometimes fierce, often painful, but always transcendent.

A statement read on her behalf said: "It’s lovely to be voted for as opposed to judged, don’t ask me why, it just feels simpler, broader, more robust. I look at the list of members in the Folio Society and realise my novel was brought to the attention of some of the writers whose work I admire most. And indeed that might have been enough."

Open to all works of literature, regardless of form, the award is the only international, English-language award nominated and judged purely by other writers. This year’s shortlists — which were revealed in January — and winners were decided entirely by the Folio Academy, made up of more than 350 writers. Previously known as the Rathbones Folio Prize, the award relaunched last year as The Writers’ Prize.

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