Crewe wins 2023 Charlotte Aitken Young Writer of the Year Award

In the UK, Tom Crewe has won the 2023 Charlotte Aitken Young Writer of the Year Award, worth £10,000 (A$19,404), for The New Life (Vintage).

Crewe’s novel was chosen from a shortlist of four announced in February by a judging panel made up of critic Johanna Thomas-Corr, author Anne Enright, novelist and critic Mendez, author and critic James McConnachie, poet Daljit Nagra and novelist Catriona Ward. It is a tale of 19th-century forbidden desire, set in London, 1894, where the Oscar Wilde trial is igniting public outcry, and everything John and Henry have longed for is suddenly under threat. United by a shared vision, the two begin work on a revolutionary book arguing for the legalisation of homosexuality.

Said McConnachie: ‘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.’

The bookselling chain Waterstones has been a retail partner of the award since its 30th anniversary year in 2022. Waterstones head of books Bea Carvalho described The New Life as ‘a simply stunning debut novel which manages to feel at once timelessly classic and urgently new’.

Crewe has a PhD in 19th-century British history from the University of Cambridge and since 2015 has been an editor at the London Review of Books. The New Life has previously won the 2023 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction and the South Bank Sky Arts Award for Literature.

The 2022 Charlotte Aitken Young Writer of the Year Award winner was Tom Benn for his book Oxblood (Bloomsbury).

Category: International news