Berry wins overall Writers’ Prize for ‘The Home Child’

Poet Liz Berry is the winner of the 2024 Writers’ Prize overall Book of the Year award, worth £30,000 (A$58,000), for The Home Child (Vintage).

Berry’s novel-in-verse was inspired 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.

Formerly known as the Rathbones Folio Prize, the Writers’ Prize is presented in three categories in addition to the overall winner. The winners in each category receive £2000 (A$3865).

The winning books in each category are:

Fiction

• The Wren, The Wren (Anne Enright, Vintage)

Nonfiction

• Thunderclap: A memoir of life and art and sudden death (Laura Cumming, Chatto & Windus)

Poetry

• The Home Child (Liz Berry, Vintage).

The winners were announced at the London Book Fair on 13 March, from shortlists announced in January.

Open to all works of literature written in English and published in the UK, the Writers’ Prize is the only international, English-language award nominated and judged purely by other writers. This year, the winners were chosen by the Folio Academy, made up of over 350 writers, rather than by individual judges.

The overall winner of last year’s prize was Margo Jefferson for Constructing a Nervous System (Granta), with Australian author Michelle de Kretser winning the fiction category for her novel Scary Monsters (A&U).

Category: International news