Vintage scores hat-trick at The Writers' Prize with Liz Berry, Anne Enright and Laura Cumming all winners

In the first year since its rebrand, The Writers’ Prize — formerly the Rathbones Folio Prize — has named Vintage authors Liz Berry, Anne Enright and Laura Cumming as the winners at a ceremony at The London Book Fair.  

For the second year running, female writers have won all three category awards and, in a prize first, all three titles were published by Vintage. 

The winners of the award — which includes an overall prize pot of £36,000 — were announced at a ceremony at the London Book Fair on Wednesday evening (13th March).

Berry’s novel-in-verse The Home Child (Chatto & Windus) was announced as the winner of the poetry category (£2,000) and triumphed as The Writers’ Prize Book of the Year (£30,000), making her the first poet since Raymond Antrobus in 2019 to win the overall award. Born in the Black Country and now living in Birmingham, Berry was inspired to write her winning book by the story of her great-aunt Eliza Showell, one of the many children forcibly emigrated to Canada as part of the British Child Migrant Schemes.  

Accepting the award, she said: "Everyday children cross our borders and children fall through gaps in systems which are so underfunded, and we’ve got to do our best as writers and readers and humans to welcome them and protect them and fight for their rights, because if poetry books teach us anything, it’s that everyone’s life is precious, and everyone’s children are our children."

Booker-winner Enright, the first laureate for Irish Fiction, won in the Fiction category (£2,000) for The Wren, The Wren, (Jonathan Cape), described by prize organisers as “a stirring meditation on love and the love between mother and daughter”. A statement read on her behalf said: "It’s lovely to be voted for as opposed to judged, don’t ask me why, it just feels simpler, broader, more robust. I look at the list of members in the Folio Society and realise my novel was brought to the attention of some of the writers whose work I admire most. And indeed that might have been enough."

Author and art critic Cumming, who has been shortlisted for the prize for three consecutive books, won the Non-Fiction category (£2,000) with Thunderclap (Chatto & Windus), a kaleidoscopic memoir connecting her life as an art critic with the vivid world of her father’s paintings and those of the Dutch Golden Age. 

Open to all works of literature, regardless of form, the award is the only international, English-language award nominated and judged purely by other writers. This year’s shortlists — which were revealed in January — and winners were decided entirely by the Folio Academy, made up of more than 350 writers. Previously known as the Rathbones Folio Prize, the award relaunched last year as The Writers’ Prize.

Minna Fry, director of the prize, said: “This year, in our new incarnation as The Writers’ Prize, we have been delighted by and deeply grateful for the engagement of the members of the Folio Academy. They have undertaken their new remit to decide on the shortlist and category winners with great seriousness, and a number of them have also supported the prize financially in its time of need.  

“Over the last nine weeks, we’ve celebrated three stunning shortlists – for fiction, poetry and non-fiction – each of which has reflected the exhilarating breadth and strength of the literary landscape in 2024. We are also grateful for the generosity of The T S Eliot Foundation, Bloomberg, the Ingram Book Group and Rathbones – as well as a number of kind individuals – who have stepped forward to support the prize.”