21 July 2021

Lissa Evans' V for Victory (Doubleday/Transworld) has been longlisted for the Comedy Women in Print Prize in the Published Comic Novel category. It is the final book in a loose trilogy, though it can be read as a stand-alone. The first two books of the trilogy, Crooked Heart and Old Baggage can be read in either order.  

The prize was launched by actor, author and stand-up comedian Helen Ledererin 2019 as a literary platform to increase exposure for diverse female voices in comedy writing, and as a way of celebrating fresh and established talent. This year sees dark humour and comedic romance from both established and debut authors, and the winners will be announced at an awards ceremony at the Groucho Club on 8th November. 

Joanne Harris, author and chair of judges for the CWIP Published Novel Prize, said: “What a marvellously diverse longlist. Humour is the thing that connects and reflects all of humanity; and I'm really looking forward to immersing myself in the wit and wisdom of these amazing women, and bringing their voices to the attention of a wider public.”

Click ...

12 July 2021

Michael Hirst (creator of Vikings and The Tudors), is adapting Anna Reid’s 2011 book Leningrad: The Epic Siege of World War II, 1941-1944, which draws mostly upon personal diaries. The project is a co-production between Range Media Partners and Svetlana and Alexey Kuzmichev’s Orangery Productions.

Hirst said: "Because the authentic voice of the people is crucial to telling the true story, one of the great resources are the diaries kept by so many people, specifically women, in the city. The majority of our main characters are women, not only because they are often overlooked or even ignored in historical accounts, but also because while many of Leningrad’s men went to war and died in battle, the women remained. I think it’s entirely right to tell the story of the Siege through the female experience.”

Click here for more.

12 July 2021

Submissions have now closed for the 2021 DRF Writers Award. All entries will now be read and you will be notified by email before the end of October 2021 if your submission is chosen for the longlist.

The shortlist will be announced at the end of November 2021. The winner of the Award will be announced at a ceremony in London on 7th December 2021 where Ian McEwan will present the Award.

The judges for the 2021 Award are Colm Tóibín (Chair), Deepa Anappara, Anna James and Ingrid Persaud.

Click here to browse the DRF website. 

01 July 2021

Ingrid Persaud has picked up the Authors' Club Best First Novel Award 2021 with Love After Love (Faber & Faber). This year's guest adjudicator, the novelist Michèle Roberts, presented the £2,500 award at a reception at the National Liberal Club in London on 30 June. She said: 'This bittersweet story of domestic abuse, loss, separation, heartbreak and redemption is leavened with deadpan humour.'

The Chair of Judges, Lucy Popescu, said: 'This is a vivid and atmospheric exploration of prejudice in Trinidad. Lyrical and beautifully crafted – a poignant debut about love and friendship and a worthy winner.' Ingrid Persaud and the other shortlisted writers can be viewed reading from their works here.

25 June 2021

Joshua Yaffa has scooped the Orwell Prize for Political Writing with Between Two Fires: Truth, Ambition and Compromise in Putin’s Russia (Granta). Described by the judges as "beautiful and haunting", the book unfolds over a series of pen-portraits, including TV producers, priests and human rights activists trying to thrive in contemporary Russian. It is the Moscow-based journalist’s first book. Yaffa dialled in from Moscow, saying: "The exercise of power and politics—especially in a place like Putin-era Russia—can complicate or scramble the pursuit of a noble, honest life, but life in all its beauty and strangeness remains all the same, even for those who make their own accommodation with the system. Orwell was a constant reference as I tried to untangle these stories and tell them with lucidity and, I hope, a measure of literary artistry."

In addition to our book category winner, we are thrilled that John Harris has been awarded the Orwell Prize for Journalism. He was named the winner for The Guardian video series Anywhere But Westminster, which he has been running with John Domokos for over ten years, chron...

25 June 2021

Ingrid Persaud has been named the winner of the Indie Book Award for Fiction 2021. She picked up the award for her debut Love After Love, which is the story tracing the life of a Trinidadian family over two decades, written in Trinidadian prose and probing the intricate connection between love and trust, and what happens to the former when the latter is disrupted. To celebrate Persaud's win, Faber & Faber has produced a special paperback edition of her book, with bright lime green sprayed edges, available exclusively from independent bookshops.

Honouring the paperback books of the summer as voted for by independent booksellers, the indie-curated awards celebrate the best reads for the summer. The winners were announced on 25th June on Scala Radio, the official media partner of the Indie Book Awards, with three out of four titles published by independent presses.

Click here for more. 

25 June 2021

Charlie Gilmour and Jemma Wadham have been nominated for the Wainwright Prizes this year. Longlisted in the UK Nature Writing category is Charlie Gilmour's Featherhood (Weidenfeld & Nicolson), a debut about repetition across generations and birds that run in the blood; about a terror of repeating the sins of the father and a desire to build a nest of one's own. Leading glaciologist Jemma Wadham's Ice Rivers (Allen Lane) is longlisted for the Writing on Global Conservation Prize, a book where she reflects upon a quarter century of adventures and discoveries across the globe whilst eloquently emphasising how vulnerable the world’s glaciers are in the face of devastating climate change.

Named after nature writer Alfred Wainwright and held in association with the National Trust, the Wainwright Prize for UK Nature Writing is awarded annually to the book which most successfully inspires readers to explore the outdoors and to nurture a respect for the natural world. Shortlists will be announced on 4th August and the winners’ announcement will be made live on 7th September at a venue still to be confirmed. 

25 June 2021

Anthony Quinn, Sam Byers and Gwendoline Riley have been longlisted for this year's Gordon Burn Prize, alongside nine other writers. Anthony Quinn is longlisted for Klopp: My Liverpool Romance (Faber), a love letter to his club’s charismatic German manager; Sam Byers for Come Join Our Disease (Faber), a darkly comic and profoundly affecting novel about resistance, radicalism and redemption; and Gwendoline Riley for My Phantoms (Granta), a story about the difficult relationship between a mother and daughter. 

The prize is run in partnership by the Gordon Burn Trust, New Writing North, Faber & Faber and Durham Book Festival. The winner will be announced at Durham Book Festival, a Durham County Council festival, on Thursday 14 October 2021. RCW author Peter Pomerantsev won the Gordon Burn Prize in 2020 for This is Not Propaganda, his study on the war against reality. 

Click here for more.

21 June 2021

The Laugh Out Loud Book Awards 2022 (the Lollies) shortlist has been revealed, and featured are Jenny Pearson and Katie and Kevin Tsang. Jenny Pearson is nominated in the age nine to thirteen category for her debut The Super Miraculous Journey of Freddie Yates (Usborne), and Katie and Kevin Tsang in the six to eight-year-old age category for Sam Wu is NOT Afraid of the Dark! (Farshore), which is the third book in the Sam Wu is NOT afraid of anything series.

The annual children's book awards, created by Scholastic and known as the Lollies, will be decided solely by children’s votes. Votes can be cast via the Scholastic website, and children can vote themselves using the PopJam app. The winning books will be announced in early 2022. 

Click here to vote.

21 June 2021

Elaine Feeney has been named Emerging Writer for her debut novel As You Were at this year’s Dalkey Literary Awards. Dearbhail McDonald, Aideen Howard and Declan Hughes, the Emerging Writer judges, called As You Were, about a businesswoman keeping a terrible secret from her family, and the people she shares a ward with, “a mighty, turbulent firestorm of a book, with a pulsing, rhythmic narrative voice. A compelling cast of characters with pitch perfect dialogue, it is tender, nuanced, forensically controlled and thrillingly unrestrained.”

Elaine Feeney said: “It is a huge honour to win the Dalkey Emerging Writer Award. I spent five years writing As You Were, and though no one forces anyone to write a book, it’s often a long journey, my journey was filled with self-doubt, and at times obsession – so it’s reassuring to have my work recognised by the judges. An award like Dalkey can really help an artist buy some time to be creative, to take time to work on your art, (and not feel guilty about it) so I’m very grateful. I can now take some more time off the day job to write full-time. Finally, never give up – if you’ve a book burning inside you, get...

15 June 2021

Abir Mukherjee is among the six authors shortlisted for the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year 2021, chosen by a public vote and the prize academy. He is nominated for Death in the East (Harvill Secker), the fourth book in Abir Mukherjee's series of novels set in 1920s India, which follows Captain Sam Wyndham as he travels to a remote temple in Assam looking for a cure for his addiction and spots a face from his past that reminds him of his first case as a policeman. 

The public are now invited to vote for the winner, and the results will be announced on the opening night of the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival on 22nd July. They will receive £3,000, and a handmade, engraved beer barrel provided by Theakston Old Peculier.

Click here to vote. 

15 June 2021

The McIlvanney Prize for Scottish crime novels longlist has been revealed, with previous winner Denise Mina among the chosen thirteen. She is nominated for her latest book The Less Dead (Harvill Secker), which tells the story of Margo, who discovers that her birth mother was a murdered sex worker.

Previously called the Scottish Crime Book of the Year Award, the Prize was renamed in memory of William McIlvanney five years ago. This year his final book, The Dark Remains, completed with the help of Ian Rankin, will be published on 2nd September by Canongate, coinciding with the announcement of the prize shortlist. The winner will be revealed in Stirling and online on 17th September during the Bloody Scotland International Crime Writing Festival, with a prize of £1,000 and nationwide promotion in Waterstones. 

Click here to discover more.

10 June 2021

The Society of Authors have chosen Elaine Feeney as the winner of the McKitterick Prize 2021, which is given annually to an author over the age of 40 for a first novel (published or unpublished), and Deepa Anappara as the runner up. Feeney's award winning debut novel As You Were (Harvill Secker) charts the intimate bonds between the female patients of a dysfunctional hospital ward and the secrets and fears that haunt their sense of self and belonging. We are also delighted that RCW author Deepa Anapara has been selected as the runner up for her debut Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line (Chatto & Windus), which is a book that draws on real incidents and a spate of disappearances in metropolitan India. 

Chair Joanne Harris announced the 35 winners for 10 different prizes, spanning writers, poets and illustrators in an online ceremony on 9th June. It is the UK’s biggest literary prize fund, worth more than £100,000.  

Click here to discover more.

08 June 2021

Fiona Benson, Luke Kennard and Denise Riley are in the running for the Forward Prizes for Poetry 2021. Luke Kennard is nominated in the Best Collection category for Notes on the Sonnets (Penned in the Margins), which sees him reimagining Shakespeare’s Sonnets through a depressing house party, and Fiona Benson's poem "Androgeus" and Denise Riley's "1948" are both up for the the £1,000 Best Single Poem award. 

The Forward Prizes for Poetry are the most influential awards for new poetry in the UK and Ireland, honouring fresh voices alongside internationally established names. The judges’ selection of shortlisted and highly commended poems will be published on 16th September 2021 in the annual Forward Book of Poetry (Faber & Faber). 

Click here to browse the shortlists. 

28 May 2021

Abdulrazak Gurnah and Joshua Yaffa have made the shortlists for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction and for Political Writing 2021, which recognizes the "best book-length political writing being published today, on both international and domestic subjects." Abdulrazak Gurnah is shortlisted for his latest novel, Afterlives (Bloomsbury), which focuses on those enduring German rule in East Africa at the beginning of the twentieth century. On the shortlisted for Political Writing is Joshua Yaffa's Between Two Fires (Granta), a sparkling analysis which shows how Putinism is built from an accumulation of compromise that leads to corruption. 

In addition to our book category nominees, we are thrilled that John Harris has been shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Journalism. He is nominated for The Guardian video series Anywhere But Westminster, which he has been running with John Domokos for over ten years, chronicling and foreshadowing many of the tumultuous political events of the decade.

Click here for ...

27 May 2021

RCW authors Francesca Gibbons and Jenny Pearson have been shortlisted for the Waterstones Children's Book Prize 2021. Gibbons is nominated her debut A Clock of Stars (HarperCollins), which is about two sisters who find themselves falling into a magical kingdom where they are swept up in a thrilling race against time; and Pearson for The Super Miraculous Journey of Freddie Yates (Usborne), which follows fact fan Freddie and his two buddies, Charlie and Ben, who all have reasons to sneak off on an unscheduled trip to Wales: to evade a health regime, or a preening stepmum, or to track down Freddie’s biological dad. 

Every year Waterstones booksellers are called on to vote for the books they believe are the very best in new children’s writing and illustration across three categories. The winners will be announced on 1st July and are expected to see a "significant boost in sales", said Waterstones, and the promise of an ongoing commitment to their writing career from the chain. 

Click ...

20 May 2021

Valeria Luiselli's Lost Children Archive, published in the UK & Ireland by 4th Estate and in the US by Alfred A. Knopf, has been selected as the winner of the Dublin Literary Award 2021. The novel explores the painful history of the Apache people and the present immigration crisis on the Southwest border, while freshly exploring themes of conquest and remembrance, and powerfully conveying the beauty of the haunted landscape. 

Valeria Luiselli said, “I’m very happy – very relieved, more than anything. It’s been a year of very slow work for me, a year of struggling with writing because my kids are not at school, so I’m in the whirlpool of the household all day. It felt like an encouragement, like someone was saying, ‘Carry on, do your work, this is what you’re meant to be doing. Just focus and continue.’”

Author Colm Tóibín, a previous winner of the award, said that Luiselli “tells an old story, the one that Cervantes told … and Cormac McCarthy, the story of what happens to the human spirit on the road, how a long journey puts in jeopardy what was stable and agreed upon.” The judges also commented, "A breath-taking feat of literary virtuosity, Lost...