Kennedy, Garmus, Wiles and more among winners of the Society of Authors’ Awards 2023

The winners of this year’s Society of Authors’ Awards have been unveiled, with Nicola Griffith taking home the inaugural prize for authors with disabilities and chronic illnesses while writers Louise Kennedy, Daniel Wiles, Bonnie Garmus and Jay Gao are among a list of over 30 overall winners.

Griffith won the inaugural ADCI (Authors with Disabilities & Chronic Illnesses) Literary Prize, for Spear (Tordotcom Publishing), a lyrical, queer reimagining of Arthurian legend in which, in the words of judge Penny Batchelor, “those usually airbrushed from history take centre stage”.

The prize, launched in 2022 to encourage greater positive representation of disability in literature, was announced alongside 10 other prizes which make up the annual Society of Authors’ Awards. The SoA Awards is the UK’s biggest literary prize fund, worth over £100,000, this year shared between 30 writers, poets and illustrators. The winners are set to be celebrated at a ceremony held at London’s Southwark Cathedral on 29th June. It will be presented by Joanne Harris and include a keynote from Val McDermid.

Prizes include the Betty Trask Prize for a first novel by a writer under 35, worth £10,000; the Eric Gregory Award for a collection of poems by a poet under 30 and awarded to six winners each receiving £4,725 and the Paul Torday Memorial Prize for a first novel by an author aged over 60, this year awarded to Garmus for Lessons in Chemistry (Transworld). The full list of awards can be found here.

Poet Gao won both an Eric Gregory Award and a Somerset Maugham Award this year for his “thrilling” debut collection Imperium (Carcanet Press), which was described by judge Wayne Holloway Smith as “the work of a poet mind shot through with intellect and cultural capital, and Wiles won the Betty Trask Prize for Mercia’s Take (Swift Press), “a brutal portrayal of life as a 19th-century miner and of a world wreaked by the exploitation that fed the British Empire.”

Judges described Mercia’s Take as "an extraordinary debut". They added: "Simultaneously intimate and epic, it tracks the journey of one man’s voyage through the 19th-century Black Country, to right injustices both personal and political, with a compassion that is never cloying. Wiles is a master stylist: in this debut, each sentence is as dark and tough as the coal our protagonist mines each day. Characters – even those who are seemingly peripheral – have voices that ring with earthy credibility. Wiles’ evocation of the landscape is stunning too, often showing the sublimity that can exist alongside struggle. With a thrillingly pacy plot and immaculately crystalline expression, this is a very special debut indeed."

Winner of the British Book Awards’ Debut Novel of the Year, Trespasses (Bloomsbury Publishing) by Kennedy, was selected as winner of the McKitterick Prize, for being “an intelligent, delicately told tale of love under military rule” and the “powerful, urgent and moving” memoir None of The Above: Reflections on Life Beyond the Binary (Canongate) by Travis Alabanza was a Somerset Maugham winner, described by judge Ardashire Vakil as “a testimony to the vicissitudes of living as a non-binary person of colour in modern Britain".

Speaking about the awards, keynote speaker McDermid said: “Awarded by authors, for authors, the SoA Awards hold a special place in the literary calendar. It is vital that we celebrate the work authors do to help us find meaning in tumultuous times, now more than ever. This year’s winners make that task easy. They have given us a plethora of riches: from sweeping novels, to searching poetry, to first works by exciting authors at the start of new careers. I hope each win fuels that joy of words that first gave birth to these many and various works."

Gao said: “It’s always an incredible feeling to know that one’s writing has been read with care and generosity, especially by the poets and writers who regularly inspire my own work. It really means a lot to be recognised as a small part of this broad and diverse creative community being celebrated through the Society of Authors. This support is important for me as, more than anything else, I know it will encourage me to keep writing.”