Tom Crewe wins £10,000 Sunday Times Young Writer Award

Début novelist and editor Tom Crewe has been named winner of the Sunday Times Charlotte Aitken Young Writer of the Year Award for The New Life (Chatto & Windus), a novel described by judge James McConnachie as “thrillingly intimate” and “a compassionate and tenderly sensual account of masculine sexuality”. 

The New Life is set in 1894 while the Oscar Wilde trial is igniting public outcry, “and everything John and Henry have longed for is suddenly under threat,” the synopsis says. “United by a shared vision, the two begin work on a revolutionary book arguing for the legalisation of homosexuality.” 

Crewe was born in Middlesbrough in 1989 and holds a PhD in 19th-century British history from the University of Cambridge. Since 2015, he has been an editor at the London Review of Books. The New Life is his first novel, which won the 2023 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction and the South Bank Sky Arts Award for Literature. 

Judge Johanna Thomas-Corr, chief literary critic for the Times and Sunday Times, said: “Sometimes a début novel comes along that feels like an immediate classic – a book that you suddenly can’t imagine not existing. If you’ve read Tom Crewe’s bold and beautifully observed début, The New Life, you’ll know that it is just such a book. He is a writer of rare promise.” 

The announcement was made at a live ceremony at Brixton’s Canova Hall by Thomas-Corr, alongside fellow judges, Booker-winning novelist and critic Anne Enright, novelist and critic Mendez, author and critic McConnachie, poet Daljit Nagra and novelist Catriona Ward. 

McConnachie said: “Novelising history is always risky, especially if the topic is political, and The New Life definitely has a polemical understory: it conjures and celebrates the first, late-Victorian stirrings of the movement for gay rights and sexual freedom more generally. But if ever a novelised treatment was justified, it is here. Tom Crewe makes you feel how much was at stake. You share the suffering and yearning of his paired protagonists, and the risks under which they laboured. Most of all, though, this is a compassionate and tenderly sensual account of masculine sexuality – a subject that does not always get the most sympathetic treatment. A shockingly good début, and an argument in itself for the value of fiction.” 

Sponsored by the Charlotte Aitken Trust, the winner receives £10,000, while shortlisted writers win £1,000 each. The winner will also receive two years’ membership to The London Library, while the remaining four shortlistees will all receive a year’s membership. 

Waterstones has been working with the award since 2022 and hosts in-store points of sale at shops across the country. Bea Carvalho, head of books, described The New Life as “a simply stunning début novel that manages to feel at once timelessly classic and urgently new”. 

Crewe beat stiff competition in a shortlist including Close to Home (Hamish Hamilton) by Michael Magee, Noreen Masud’s autobiography A Flat Place (Hamish Hamilton) and Momtaza Mehri’s début poetry collection Bad Diaspora Poems (Jonathan Cape).