Sunday Times Charlotte Aitken Young Writer of the Year Award

The Sunday Times Charlotte Aitken Young Writer of the Year Award is an annual award, made possible by the Charlotte Aitken Trust and the Sunday Times. The prize of £10,000 is awarded for a full-length published or self-published (in book or ebook formats) work of fiction, non-fiction or poetry, by a British or Irish author aged 18-35 years. There are prizes of £1,000 for each shortlistee. The winning book will be the work of the most outstanding literary merit.

The Sunday Times Charlotte Aitken Young Writer of the Year Award is closed for submissions.

The 2024 Sunday Times Charlotte Aitken Young Writer of the Year Award Winner

Harriet Baker for Rural Hours published by Allen Lane

‘Rural Hours is a book of rich and sustained attentiveness. It is an accomplished work of non-fiction whose authorial voice so subtly self-assured that its subjects come to life freely, vividly, and without imposition.’

Victoria Adukwei Bulley (2024 judge)

The 2024 Sunday Times Charlotte Aitken Young Writer of the Year Award Shortlist

Moses McKenzie for Fast by the Horns published by Wildfire

Scott Preston for The Borrowed Hills published by John Murray

Ralf Webb for Strange Relations published by Sceptre

Here are four unforgettable new voices in fiction and non-fiction who possess thrilling potential. They are all offering us new angles on the world and doing it with such intelligence and conviction.

Johanna Thomas-Corr (2024 judge and chair)

With thanks, the judges of the 2024 Sunday Times Charlotte Aitken Young Writer of the Year Award:

Victoria Adukwei Bulley

Victoria Adukwei Bulley is a poet and writer whose work has appeared widely in publications including the London Review of Books, LitHub, and The Atlantic. She is the winner of an Eric Gregory Award, and her critically acclaimed debut poetry book, QUIET, won the Folio Prize for Poetry, the John Pollard Poetry Prize, and was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize. QUIET is published by Faber & Faber in the UK and in North America by Knopf, Penguin Random House.

Claire Adam

Claire Adam, born and raised in Trinidad and Tobago, studied Physics in the US, and later took an MA in Creative Writing at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her first novel, Golden Child, was published in 2019 by Faber (UK) and SJP for Hogarth (USA), and in translation. It featured on BBC Radio 4’s ‘Book at Bedtime’ and was named one of BBC’s ‘100 Novels that Changed the World’. It was awarded the Desmond Elliott Prize, the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award, the Author’s Club Best First Novel Award and the McKitterick Prize and was named as a ‘Book of the Year’ by the Evening Standard and The Times.

Andrew Miller

Andrew Miller was born in Bristol in 1960. He is the author of ten novels (the latest due out in October this year). He has taught on the writing MA at Bath Spa and at Teesside University. He is the author of Booker shortlisted novel Oxygen, Now We Shall Be Entirely Free and Pure. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He lives in South Somerset.

Tomiwa Owolade

Tomiwa Owolade is an author and journalist. He has written for many publications, including The Times and Sunday Times, and has also spoken on Times Radio and BBC Radio Four. His first book, This is Not America, was published in June 2023.

Johanna Thomas-Corr (chair)

Johanna Thomas-Corr is the literary editor of The Sunday Times. She has been a reviewer for the paper since 2019 and was previously a contributing writer for the New Statesman. She has written extensively for The Times, Observer, Financial Times and Evening Standard. She judged the Goldsmiths Prize for Fiction in 2021. This is her second year of judging the Young Writer of the Year award.

Justin Webb

Justin Webb is the longest serving presenter of the Today Programme on Radio Four. He was the BBC’s first North America Editor and first British journalist to interview Barack Obama after he became president. He is the author of several books about America and, most recently, a highly acclaimed memoir of the 1970s, The Gift of a Radio. He has a degree in Economics from the London School of Economics.

2023:
Tom Crewe for The New Life (Chatto & Windus, Vintage)
Shortlisted:
Michael Magee for Close to Home (Hamish Hamilton, Penguin Random House UK)
Noreen Masud for A Flat Place (Hamish Hamilton, Penguin Random House, UK)
Momtaza Mehri for Bad Diaspora Poems (Jonathan Cape, Vintage)

2022
Winner:
Tom Benn for Oxblood (Bloomsbury)
Shortlisted:
Lucy Burns for Larger than an Orange (Chatto & Windus)
Maddie Mortimer for Maps of our Spectacular Bodies (Picador)
Katherine Rundell for Super-Infinite (Faber & Faber)

2021
Winner:
Cal Flyn for Islands of Abandonment (HarperCollins)
Shortlisted:
Anna Beecher for Here Comes the Miracle (Orion)
Rachel Long for My Darling from the Lions (Picador)
Caleb Azumah Nelson for Open Water (Penguin Random House)
Megan Nolan for Acts of Desperation (Jonathan Cape)

2020
Winner:
Jay Bernard for Surge (Chatto & Windus)
Shortlisted:
Catherine Cho for Inferno (Bloomsbury)
Seán Hewitt for Tongues of Fire (Penguin Books)
Marina Kemp for Nightingale (HarperCollins)

2019
Winner:
Raymond Antrobus for The Perseverance (Penned in the Margins)
Shortlisted:
Julia Armfield for Salt Slow (Picador)
Yara Rodrigues Fowler for Stubborn Archivist (Fleet, Little, Brown)
Kim Sherwood for Testament (Quercus)

2018
Winner:
Adam Weymouth for Kings of the Yukon (Particular Books)
Shortlisted:
Fiona Mozley for Elmet (John Murray)
Laura Freeman for The Reading Cure (W&N)
Imogen Hermes Gowar for The Mermaid and Mrs. Hancock (Vintage)

2017
Winner:
Sally Rooney for Conversations with Friends (Faber & Faber)
Shortlisted:
Julianne Pachico for The Lucky Ones (Faber & Faber)
Claire North for The End of the Day (Orbit)
Sara Taylor for The Lauras (Windmill Books)
Minoo Dinshaw for Outlandish Knight: The Byzantine Life of Steven Runciman (Allen Lane)

2016
Winner:
Max Porter for Grief is the Thing with Feathers (Faber & Faber)
Shortlisted:
Andrew McMillan for physical (Jonathan Cape)
Jessie Greengrass for An Account of the Decline of the Great Auk, According to One Who Saw It (JM Originals)
Benjamin Wood for The Ecliptic (Scribner)

2015
Winner:
Sarah Howe for Loop of Jade (Chatto & Windus)
Her book of poetry was also awarded the T.S. Eliot Prize.
Shortlisted:
Ben Fergusson for The Spring of Kasper Meier (Abacus)
Sunjeev Sahota for The Year of the Runaways (Picador)
Sara Taylor for The Shore (Windmill Books)

2009 Winner – Ross Raisin for God’s Own Country (Penguin)
His novel was also awarded a Betty Trask Award in 2008.

2008 Adam Foulds for The Truth about These Strange Times (Weidenfeld)

2007 Naomi Alderman for Disobedience (Viking)

2004 Robert Macfarlane for Mountains of the Mind (Granta)

2003 William Fiennes for The Snow Geese (Granta)

2001 Zadie Smith for White Teeth (Hamish Hamilton)

2000 Sarah Waters for Affinity (Little, Brown)

1999 Paul Farley for The Boy from the Chemist is Here to See You (Macmillan)

1998 Patrick French for Liberty or Death (HarperCollins)

1997 Francis Spufford for I May Be Some Time (Faber & Faber)

1996 Katherine Pierpoint for Truffle Beds (Faber & Faber)

1995 Andrew Cowan for Pig (Michael Joseph)

1994 William Dalrymple for City of Djinns (HarperCollins)

1993 Simon Armitage for Kid (Faber & Faber)

1992 Caryl Phillips for Cambridge (Bloomsbury)

1991 Helen Simpson for Four Bare Legs in a Bed (Heinemann)