Paul Torday published his first novel Salmon Fishing in the Yemen aged 60. The family have decided to set up this new prize in Torday’s honour, celebrating first novels by authors aged 60 or over.
The winner will receive £3,000, with a set of Paul Torday’s collected works. Runners-up will receive £1,000 and one specially selected Paul Torday novel with a commemorative book plate. The prize is indebted to W & N Fiction for generously providing these books by Paul Torday.
The 2024 Paul Torday Memorial Prize has now closed for submissions.
The 2023 Paul Torday Winner
Bonnie Garmus for Lessons in Chemistry published by Doubleday, Penguin Random House UK
‘It’s difficult to believe that Lessons in Chemistry is Bonnie Garmus’s first novel. Her central character, Elizabeth Zott, springs off the page and confronts us such wit and authority that she seems always to have existed somewhere between Southern California and the land of wishful thinking. Zott takes the starring role in this delicious tale of the proto-feminist revenge.’
—Andrew Taylor, 2023 Paul Torday judge.
The 2023 Paul Torday Runner-Up:
Julie Owen Moylan for That Green Eyed Girl published by Penguin Random House UK
The 2023 Paul Torday Prize Shortlist:
Reverend Richard Coles for Murder Before Evensong published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson
Tony Curtis for Darkness in the City of Light published by Seren Books
Jonathan Franklin for Red Road Green published by Sparsile Books Ltd
If you are interested in buying any of the books shortlisted here, please visit Bookshop.org. A percentage of each sale will go to the Authors’ Contingency Fund, providing hardship grants to authors in financial difficulty.
With thanks, the judges of the 2023 Paul Torday Memorial Prize:
Rasheda Ashanti Malcom
Rasheda Ashanti Malcolm writes novels and women’s romantic fiction. Her first novel, Swimming With Fishes was published in 2017 and their second, Love Again, in 2020.She is now working on her third novel, with a fourth in the pipeline and a non-fiction book, her first non-fiction, which is aimed at first-time writers and women who want to write but can’t find the motivation or inspiration.
Kathy O’Shaughnessy
Kathy O’Shaughnessy was educated at Camden School for Girls. She went on to study English at Oxford, where she gained a first, and won the Thackeray Prize and Violet Vaughan Morgan Prize. She began an M-Phil on Byron, but gave it up to review books for Time Out, New Society, and The Spectator. She went on to work as Deputy Editor on The Literary Review, Arts & Books Editor of Vogue, Literary Editor of The European, Deputy Editor of The Telegraph Arts & Books. She has reviewed books for The Guardian, The Times, The Financial Times, The Observer, The Independent, The Telegraph, The TLS, New Statesman, and numerous other publications. Her short stories have been published in Faber’s First Fictions, and she edited and introduced the Croatian Drago Stambuk’s poems, Incompatible Animals. In Love with George Eliot is her first novel, published by Scribe. It was featured on Radio 4’s Open Book and it won the Society of Author’s Paul Torday Memorial Prize.
Andrew Taylor
Andrew Taylor is a bestselling crime and historical novelist, and the winner of the Diamond Dagger of the Crime Writers Association, the Gold Crown of the Historical Writers Association and many other awards. He has written nearly fifty books, listed here, three of which have been televised.
2023
Winner: Bonnie Garmus for Lessons in Chemistry (Doubleday, Penguin Random House)
Runner-up: Julie Owen Moylan for That Green Eyed Girl (Penguin Random House)
2022
- Winner: Jane Fraser for Advent (Honno: Welsh Women’s Press)
- Runner-up: Michael Mallon for The Disciple (Zuleika)
2021
- Kathy O’Shaughnessy for In Love with George Eliot (Scribe UK)
- Runner-up: Karen Raney for All the Water in the World (John Murray, Two Roads)
2020
- Donald S. Murray for As the Women Lay Dreaming (Saraband)
- Runner-up: Gaby Koppel for Reparation (Honno Press)
2019
- Anne Youngson for Meet Me at the Museum (Doubleday)
- Runner-up: Norma MacMaster for Silence Under a Stone (Doubleday Ireland)
Paul Torday
Paul Torday (1946 – 2013) was a businessman and author of nine books. His first novel, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen (2007), was an immediate international bestseller, later made into a film starring Ewan MacGregor and Emily Blunt. His fiction has been translated into twenty-eight languages and won several awards, including the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction. The Paul Torday Memorial Prize was founded by his family in his honour.
Hawthornden Foundation
Hawthornden Foundation is a private charitable foundation supporting contemporary writers and the literary arts. Established by Drue Heinz, the noted philanthropist and patron of the arts, the Foundation is named after Hawthornden Castle in Midlothian, Scotland, where an international residential fellowship program provides month-long retreats for creative writers from all disciplines to work in peaceful surroundings. In addition, the Foundation sponsors the annual Hawthornden Prize, one of Britain’s oldest and foremost literary awards, and provides grant support to other literary programs.
