You are viewing your 1 free article this month. Login to read more articles.
Paul Murray's The Bee Sting wins the £30,000 inaugural Nero Gold Prize Book of the Year
Paul Murray has won the £30,000 inaugural Nero Gold Prize Book of the Year for The Bee Sting (Hamish Hamilton), described as “a gripping saga of one highly dysfunctional family that asks if a single moment of bad luck – a patch of ice on the road, a bee caught beneath a bridal veil – can change the direction of a life”.
Murray was named the winner at a ceremony at HERE at Outernet, in central London this evening (14th March) hosted by broadcast journalist Sarah Montague. Chair of judges Bernardine Evaristo presented Murray with the prize, describing The Bee Sting as a “wonderfully ambitious and entrancing novel about a family imploding, against a background of Ireland’s economic and social crisis of the late Noughties”.
Receiving the award Murray said: "what an incredible honour, I’m really speechless" and, visibly emotional, dedicated the award to his father, who is unwell at the moment and wasn’t able to make the ceremony. He told journalists: "It’s the first Nero Prize [...] so there will never be another first winner, so that’s really wonderful and it’s a tremendous honour."
Evaristo said: “Suspenseful and linguistically astonishing, The Bee Sting is written with great wit and humanity, with a cast of complex characters who are held back by their past, mired in the present and longing for a different future. Paul Murray is a supremely gifted storyteller as we learn of unspoken secrets and desires in difficult and sometimes dangerous situations, in a rich, multilayered novel that is both epic and intimate in scale. This is fiction of the finest calibre and we all unanimously agreed that The Bee Sting should win the Nero Gold Prize 2023 Book of the Year.”
Evaristo chaired a final judging panel that included the veteran journalist James Naughtie and broadcaster Susie Dent, who is best known as the resident word expert on Channel 4’s "Countdown".
This is the first year of the Nero Book Awards, which seeks to celebrate “outstanding books and writers from the UK and Ireland of the past 12 months across four categories: children’s fiction, debut fiction, fiction and non-fiction". The Bee Sting beat Close to Home by Michael Magee (debut fiction), The Swifts by Beth Lincoln (children’s fiction), and Strong Female Character by Fern Brady (non-fiction) to win the overall prize. Gerry Ford, founder and group chief executive officer of Caffè Nero, told attendees at the prize ceremony 250 of the chain’s coffee shops will have copies of the four category winners in shops for a period of time. The Bookseller has contacted Nero for more details about how this will work.
Evaristo told journalists that all the books were “interesting and important” but the judges felt The Bee Sting fulfilled the brief the most, as it was a book “that you would want to press into the hands of other readers”. When asked if the 650-page novel may put off some readers, Evaristo insisted “there’s a lot to be said for the stamina you need to get through a big book” and that she found The Bee Sting “enjoyable from start to finish”. “It is a very accomplished book and it just holds you in its grip [...] it didn’t lose my attention at all,” she said.
She added that the judging process had been “a joy”, in part because there were only four books to read after the category winners were chosen by expert panels of writers, broadcasters and booksellers, “so you knew that they were the winners in their field”.
The Bee Sting has been nominated for a number of awards, including shortlistings for the Booker Prize and The Writers’ Prize 2024. It won the An Post Irish Book of the Year 2023. Simon Prosser, publishing director at Hamish Hamilton, said "it feels so right" for Murray to win the inaugural Nero Gold Prize. He told The Bookseller: "The wonderful thing about this book is it has had such incredible word of mouth. It’s one of those books where I keep bumping into people who tell me that they heard about it from friends who loved the book. It was rather a phenomenon anyway, in terms of word of mouth, and I think that the Nero is only going to help to encourage people to read it. I love the fact they are putting all these books in their bookshops. It’s brilliant."
Ford described The Bee Sting as “an exceptional book that carries emotion, honesty and authenticity”, adding: “To have such an impressive and well-written book as the first winner of our awards feels right. The awards are designed to recognise great writers, great literature and a great read, and I think they have done exactly that. The support from the industry, writers and publishers for the Nero Book Awards has been fantastic. I congratulate Paul on winning in such a competitive and high-quality field.”
After his award win, Murray told journalists The Bee Sting was originally going to be "a short romantic comedy", but "the book just kind of grabbed me, and the voices grabbed me and it just expanded and expanded and expanded". He said he would like to use some of the winnings to take his family on holiday and is currently working on a book for younger readers.
