Tom Crewe, Jacqueline Crooks and Alice Slater longlisted for the £2.5k Authors’ Club Best First Novel

Tom Crewe, Jacqueline Crooks and Alice Slater are among those longlisted for the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award, now in its 70th year.

Penguin Random House dominates the 12-strong longlist, with five nominations for the £2,500 prize. There are three titles from Hachette, two from Serpent’s Tail, one from Bloomsbury and one from the Indigo Press. 

London Review of Books editor Crewe is nominated for The New Life (Chatto & Windus) while Crooks’ is in the running for her Women’s Prize-shortlisted Fire Rush (Jonathan Cape). Other PRH titles include Santanu Bhattacharya’s One Small Voice (Fig Tree), Heather Darwent’s The Things We Do to Our Friends (Viking) and Close to Home (Hamish Hamilton) by Michael Magee. 

Former Waterstones staffer Slater is recognised for Death of a Bookseller (Hodder & Stoughton) along with publishing stablemate Wiz Wharton for Ghost Girl, Banana. Fellow Hachette writer Viktoria Lloyd-Barlow has been selected for All the Little Bird-Hearts (Tinder Press). 

Across the indies, the double-header from Serpent’s Tail includes Kate Collins’ A Good House for Children and Sarah Thomas for Queen K while The Five Sorrowful Mysteries of Andy Africa (Bloomsbury Circus) by Stephen Buoro is also featured. Finally Sian Hughes is in contention for Pearl (The Indigo Press). 

The winning novel will be selected by this year’s guest adjudicator journalist and broadcaster Samira Ahmed from a shortlist drawn up by a panel of Authors’ Club members, chaired by writer Lucy Popescu.   

The prize is open to any debut novel written in English and published in the UK. The £2,500 prize exists to support UK-based authors, publishers and agents, so the novel must originate in the UK and not have been published anywhere else in the world before its UK publication.

Popescu said: “There are fresh perspectives on the coming-of-age narrative and a thrilling range of themes, from corruption and religious intolerance, through neurodiversity and masculinity, loss and bereavement, wealth and privilege, obsession and desire, to ghosts and superstition. As well as their inward journeys, the books transport us from Britain to India and Hong Kong, Jamaica and Nigeria, and a luxury yacht in the Maldives.” 

The shortlist will be announced on 25th March with an event for shortlisted writers at the National Liberal Club in London on 24th April. The winner will be announced at a dinner at the National Liberal Club on 22nd May.

Inaugurated in 1954, the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award is now in its 70th year, making it the longest-running UK prize for debut fiction and – except for the James Tait Black and the Hawthornden – the oldest literary prize in Britain.