Sunday Times Charlotte Aitken Young Writer of the Year Award

For full-length fiction, non-fiction or poetry by a British or Irish author aged 18-35

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 now open for submissions.
Deadline to enter the prize: Monday 8 September 2025

The Sunday Times Charlotte Aitken Trust Young Writer of the Year Award is 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.

The winner is awarded £10,000 and three runners-up are awarded £1,000 each. The winning book will be the work of the most outstanding literary merit.

The award is administered by the Society of Authors and will be presented in 2026.

Deadline for submissions: Monday 8 September 2025

Entry criteria:

  • UK and Irish citizens and those who have been resident in the UK and/or the Republic of Ireland for the three years preceding the award are all eligible.
  • The author must be between the ages of 18 and 35 years on 31 December 2025.
  • The author must be a UK or Irish citizen or resident in the UK and/or the Republic of Ireland for the three years preceding the award.
  • The work submitted must be by one author in the English language.
  • The work submitted must have been first published in the UK and/or the Republic of Ireland, in the English language, between 1 November 2024 and 31 October 2025.
  • The work submitted must be by a living author.
  • eBooks must be submitted in PDF format.
  • Works written for children are not eligible.
  • Submissions must not contain AI generated work.

Publishers may enter up to two entries per imprint and may provide a written submission for one further title for possible call in.

How to enter:

For each entry, please send eight physical copies of the book to:

Sunday Times Charlotte Aitken Trust Young Writers Award
Prizes Department
24 Bedford Row
Holborn
London
WC1R 4EH

Please note any couriers should use the entrance on Theobalds Road.

Please also upload a digital version of the book when prompted below.  If the file you are using is too large for the form, please complete the rest of the entry form and then send the file via email or WeTransfer to prizes@societyofauthors.org.

Call ins: If you are entering a call in please enter your written submission. There is no need to send copies of the book until you are contacted by the SoA, though we do ask that you upload a digital copy to this form.

The work submitted must have been first published in the UK and/or the Republic of Ireland, in the English language, between 1 November 2024 and 31 October 2025.
The author must be between the ages of 18 and 35 on 31 December 2025. You may be asked to provide proof of age at shortlist stage.
UK and Irish citizens and those who have been resident in the UK and/or the Republic of Ireland for the three years preceding the award are all eligible.
If self-published please enter n/a
If self-published please enter n/a
Publishers may enter up to two entries per imprint and may provide a written submission for one further title for possible call in.
Click or drag a file to this area to upload.
Please upload a digital version of the book in addition to physical copies sent in to The Society of Authors. If the file you are using is too large for the form, please complete the rest of the entry form and then send the file via email or WeTransfer to prizes@societyofauthors.org.
Click or drag a file to this area to upload.
If the file you are using is too large for the form, please complete the rest of the entry form and then send the file via email or WeTransfer to prizes@societyofauthors.org.
Click or drag a file to this area to upload.
Please include any photographer credit in the file name.

For call in titles only:

It is not necessary to send copies of call in titles until you are contacted by the SoA but please upload a digital version of the book. If the file you are using is too large for the form, please complete the rest of the entry form and then send the file via email or WeTransfer to prizes@societyofauthors.org.

This should be a paragraph on why the judges should call this title in for consideration.

Confirmations

I agree to abide by the terms and conditions of entry and confirm that the submitted work and the author meet the entry criteria.
By ticking the above you are confirming that you have permission to share all the above information with the Society of Authors and The Sunday Times/Charlotte Aitken Trust team and their PR partners. We may invite you to take part in PR activities surrounding the prize but you are under no obligation to do so and will always contact you to ask your permission before giving your contact details to our media partners. To read our full privacy policy please visit our website: societyofauthors.org/Legal-Privacy/Privacy-Statement.

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)

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