Baker wins 2024 Sunday Times Charlotte Aitken Young Writer of the Year Award

In the UK, Harriet Baker has won the £10,000 (A$20,365) Sunday Times Charlotte Aitken Young Writer of the Year Award for Rural Hours (Allen Lane), a biography of Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Rosamond Lehmann.

Baker’s book was chosen from a shortlist of four that also included Fast by the Horns (Moses McKenzie, Wildfire), The Borrowed Hills (Scott Preston, John Murray) and Strange Relations: Masculinity, Sexuality and Art in Mid-Century America (Ralf Webb, Sceptre). Chair of judges Johanna Thomas-Corr described the shortlisted authors as ‘unforgettable new voices in fiction and nonfiction who possess thrilling potential’.

Said Thomas-Corr of the winning work: ‘Rural Hours has made me excited about literary criticism again. [Baker] has succeeded stunningly in her task of showing how transformative country life can be for a writer’s imagination. Every page of this quietly confident debut is inspiring, crafted as it is with deep intelligence and maturity of thought.’

In Rural Hours, Baker ‘tells the story of three different women who moved to the countryside and were forever changed by it,’ said the award organisers. ‘Following long periods of creative uncertainty and private disappointment, each of Baker’s subjects are invigorated by new landscapes. In the country, they find their paths: to convalescence and recovery; to sexual and political awakening; and, above all, to personal freedom and creative flourishing.’

Baker has written for publications including the London Review of Books, Paris Review, New Statesman, TLS, Apollo and frieze. In 2018, she was awarded the Biographers’ Club Tony Lothian Prize.

The winner of the 2023 Charlotte Aitken Young Writer of the Year Award was Tom Crewe for The New Life (Vintage).

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