Hay wins Caledonia Novel Award

Alex Hay has won the Caledonia Novel Award for his "deft, clever and slippery book" The Housekeepers.

The international, Edinburgh-based award celebrates unpublished and self-published novelists for adults and YA. Now in its eighth year of competition, it attracted almost 500 entries from 30 different countries this time around.

Hay wins £1,500 and a specially-designed artwork by Edinburgh artist Lucy Roscoe. As the writer of the best novel from the UK and Ireland, he also wins a free place on a writing course at The Moniack Mhor Creative Writing Centre.

He has now signed with Alice Lutyens at Curtis Brown, who was among the judges. She said: “I was instantly taken by this roaring plot of a housekeeper, a black-market queen, a failed actress, a desperate seamstress and poverty-stricken hatmaker taking on the richest of the rich in a dastardly plot of revenge and retribution, with the help of two circus girls. 

"From the minute I met Mrs King on the first page I was gripped. The concept of these women who have been utterly dismissed by society, turning it all around and wreaking the best of revenge just really resounded with me. The writing is deft, clever and slippery. The atmosphere and setting gave me absolute chills up my spine, and within pages I was egging on the women to succeed."

Highly Commended for his novel A Short Walk Through a Wide World was American writer Douglas Westerbeke.