McKenzie’s ‘profound’ debut novel wins Hawthornden Prize for Literature

Moses McKenzie has been awarded the Hawthornden Prize for Literature for his debut novel An Olive Grove in Ends (Wildfire).

Later this month, McKenzie will be presented with the £15,000 prize at a private ceremony in London.

The Hawthornden Prize is awarded annually to a British, Irish or British-based author for a work of “imaginative literature”, including poetry, novels, history, biography and creative non-fiction — published in the previous calendar year. The Hawthornden Prize does not solicit submissions and the judges’ shortlist is not publicly announced.

Previous winners include Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, Ted Hughes, V S Naipaul, Bruce Chatwin, Alan Bennett, Hilary Mantel, Ali Smith and Colm Toibin.

Caroline Moore, author, literary critic and book reviewer, and one of the five judges of this year’s prize, said: “An Olive Grove in Ends is a dazzling debut, richly textured, gritty and profound. Moses McKenzie offers a thrillingly distinctive new voice, both street-wise and literary; lilting Jamaican patois mixed with Bristol slang is shot through with the language of the Bible and of the Koran. Set in the world of the disenfranchised and of drug-dealers, the novel is a moving tale of earthly love and spiritual redemption.”

McKenzie won the Soho House Breakthrough Writer Award in 2022 and a Somerset Maugham Award in 2023. He was named as one of the Observer’s 10 Must-Read Debut Novelists of 2022. His second novel, Fast by the Horns, will be published by Wildfire in spring 2024.