Rundell and Mortimer shortlisted for Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year

The 2022 Sunday Times Charlotte Aitken Young Writer of the Year Award shortlist has been revealed, featuring Katherine Rundell and Maddie Mortimer among others.

Oxford Fellow Rundell is nominated for her Baillie Gifford Prize-winning Super-Infinite (Faber & Faber), described as a “complex portrait of England’s greatest love poet, John Donne”, while Mortimer features for her Desmond Elliott Prize-winning Maps of our Spectacular Bodies (Picador).  

Manchester-born Lucy Burns is nominated for her “intimate” memoir Larger than an Orange (Chatto & Windus), which explores abortion as a personal and political experience, while Tom Benn is shortlisted for Oxblood (Bloomsbury), which was lauded as a “poignantly rendered exploration of domesticity and violence”.

The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year award celebrates fiction, non-fiction and poetry by British or Irish authors aged 35 or under. Judges shortlisted four writers, bucking the trend of the previous two years in which five were nominated.

This year’s judges were Andrew Holgate, who remained chair of judges, and the new Sunday Times literary editor, Johanna Thomas-Corr. They were joined by critic and journalist Stig Abell, poet Mona Arshi, author Oyinkan Braithwaite, and novelist and earlier winner of the prize, Francis Spufford.

Thomas-Corr said: “You can’t help but admire four young writers who have taken huge risks with style, subject and form and who have set themselves free of publishing conventions. All of them have taken on unpromising subjects and produced works of great beauty and generosity that refuse to be bent into shape. These are books that you can read again and again – and still feel rewarded.”

Arshi added: “It was joyful to encounter each of these books and be introduced to four new exceptional voices entering the literary landscape. All four books this year are doing something new and exciting in the genres they travel in, they are such different books and what ultimately stood out for me was their attention to language as well as the originality of the ideas and forms they so meticulously explored.”

This year’s winner will receive a £10,000 cash prize, with the shortlistees receiving £1,000 each. The British Council will be advocating the authors to international audiences and helping them to forge new literary connections oversees, while Waterstones, which was introduced as a partner last year, will celebrate them with bespoke content across all of their channels, including an exclusive competition in the Waterstones Plus newsletter and specially commissioned content for their blog, alongside in-store point-of-sale to showcase this year’s writers. 

Bea Carvalho, head of fiction at Waterstones, said: “The announcement of The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award shortlist marks an important moment in the year’s literary calendar, and we are delighted to see the judges highlight another selection of spectacularly talented new writers. The award has helped to launch the careers of some of today’s brightest stars across fiction and non-fiction writing, and everyone at Waterstones is excited to see which of these brilliant four writers will be named this year’s winner. They would all be very worthy champions.”

Over the coming weeks, Granta will publish extracts from all four titles on granta.com. The winner will be announced in a ceremony at a new venue on 14th March 2023.