Benn wins £10,000 Sunday Times Young Writer Award

Author and screenwriter Tom Benn has been named winner of the 2022 Sunday Times Charlotte Aitken Trust Young Writer of the Year Award for his novel, Oxblood (Bloomsbury), which explores the generational trauma caused by patriarchal violence.

The award celebrates fiction, non-fiction and poetry by British or Irish authors aged 35 or under. Benn will receive a cash prize of £10,000 and joins previous winners including Jay Bernard, Sally Rooney and Max Porter.

The announcement was made during a live event at Skylight Peckham by the new Sunday Times literary editor Johanna Thomas-Corr, alongside 2022 chair of judges Andrew Holgate, fellow judges Francis Spufford, Mona Arshi, Stig Abell, Oyinkan Braithwaite and chair of the Charlotte Aitken Trust, Sebastian Faulks.

Benn’s book looks at the domestic lives of three generations of working-class women in 1980s Manchester and was selected from a shortlist of four writers, which included Katherine Rundell, Maddie Mortimer and Lucy Burns.

Thomas-Corr said: “Tom Benn is one of publishing’s best kept secrets. His story about the struggles of three generations of women in a Manchester crime clan has been rendered with care and specificity. The result is an atmospheric family saga that contains so much buried love, anger, grief, sexual jealousy and bitter disappointment.”

Holgate said: “What a voice Tom Benn has got, what a feel for character and place, and what an uncompromising approach he has to his subject and material. He inhabits his milieu of 1980s Manchester with total conviction. We were bowled over as a judging panel by Oxblood.”

Oxblood, Benn’s fourth novel, was also longlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize 2022. His first novel, The Doll Princess (Jonathan Cape), was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize and the Portico Prize and longlisted for the CWA’s John Creasey Dagger.

Benn’s creative non-fiction has appeared in the Paris Review and he won the BFI’s iWrite scheme for emerging screenwriters. His first film, “Real Gods Require Blood”, premiered in competition at the Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for Best Short Film at the BFI London Film Festival. Born in Stockport in 1987, he now teaches on the UEA Crime Fiction Creative Writing MA and lives in Norwich.