Category Awards and prizes

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Debut author Colwill Brown wins BBC short story award for ‘heartbreaking’ tale – read an extract here

Brown’s story of a teenage life ‘critically damaged in a moment’ was the ‘unanimous’ pick for the £15,000 prize
• Read an extract from the story below

Doncaster-born writer Colwill Brown has won this year’s BBC national short story award for a “heartbreaking” entry about shame and the long-term effects of trauma, told in South Yorkshire dialect.

Brown was announced as the winner of the £15,000 award, run in collaboration with Cambridge University, at a ceremony held at BBC Broadcasting House on Tuesday evening.

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As a Booker prize judge I helped whittle 153 books down to a shortlist of six. Here’s why you should read them | Chris Power

Ben Markovits, David Szalay, Kiran Desai, Andrew Miller, Susan Choi and Katie Kitamura’s books will all take you on enthralling journeys

The Booker prize is both a serious and celebratory undertaking. It should be, anyway, for those who care about literature, and I’ve certainly found it to be so since I began reading this year’s submissions on a stormy Devon beach on New Year’s Eve (fun, but subsequently I relied on the books, not ambient conditions, to provide the drama).

Now the shortlist is decided, I and my fellow judges – our chair, Roddy Doyle, who won the prize in 1993, the novelists Ayòbámi Adébáyò and Kiley Reid (both previous longlistees), and the actor, producer and publisher Sarah Jessica Parker – struggle to believe 153 books have become just six, and that our monthly meetings to discuss form, content and font size are at an end.

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‘Brilliantly human’: Kiran Desai and David Szalay make Booker prize shortlist

No debut novels are among the six finalists, with established authors including Ben Markovits and previously shortlisted Andrew Miller in the running

No debuts appear on this year’s Booker prize shortlist, which is dominated by established authors including previous winner Kiran Desai and previously shortlisted writers David Szalay and Andrew Miller.

Ben Markovits, Susan Choi and Katie Kitamura are also on the list, which was announced at an event at the Southbank Centre in central London on Tuesday evening.

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Hilary Mantel championed emerging writers – a new prize in her memory will help them get published

Judged by Maggie O’Farrell, Ben Miles and Chigozie Obioma, the Hilary Mantel prize for fiction will recognise emerging talent, and pay tribute to the Wolf Hall author’s legacy

A few months after Hilary Mantel died in September 2022, the novelist Maggie O’Farrell was browsing in a bookshop. Stopping at a table of new novels, she noticed a couple with Mantel’s endorsement on the cover, which, she tells me, she generally regards as instantly justifying the book’s price. This time, though, “I suddenly thought there aren’t going to be many more of these. It was such a sad moment. We’re not going to get another Mantel book, and we’re also not going to get to know about the books that she read and loved.”

To many readers who gobbled up Mantel’s books – 17 of them, including the novel Beyond Black, and the Wolf Hall trilogy, which won two Booker prizes – it’s extraordinary that she found time or energy for anything beside the mammoth research that her vast historical enterprises entailed, not to mention her enthusiastic and detailed involvement in their various adaptations. But Mantel was an engaged and enthusiastic supporter of other writers, especially those in the crucial early stages of their careers. Perhaps she never forgot how long it took her to see the first novel she wrote, A Place of Greater Safety, finally emerge in print in 1992.

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Sally Rooney unable to collect award over Palestine Action arrest threat

The Normal People author can no longer safely enter the UK without potentially facing arrest, according to a statement read out by her publisher at the prize ceremony

Irish author Sally Rooney could not travel to collect a literary prize this week over concerns that she may be arrested if she enters the UK, given her support of banned group Palestine Action.

Rooney won the Sky Arts award for literature for her fourth novel, Intermezzo. At a ceremony on Tuesday, audiences were told that Rooney “couldn’t be here”, before her editor, Faber publisher Alex Bowler, collected the award on her behalf.

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Wainwright prize for nature writing awarded to memoir about raising a hare during lockdown

Debut author Chloe Dalton’s ‘dream-like’ book Raising Hare follows the writer from London to the countryside

A memoir about a woman who rescued a hare during the pandemic has won this year’s Wainwright prize book of the year.

Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton follows the author from London to the countryside, where she looked after a leveret during lockdown.

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Polari prize nominees and judges withdraw after inclusion of John Boyne over gender identity views

800 writers and publishing workers have signed a statement objecting to the LGBTQ+ book prize’s nomination of Boyne, who described himself as a ‘terf’

Ten authors nominated for this year’s Polari prizes, a set of UK awards celebrating LGBTQ+ literature, have withdrawn from the awards over the longlisting of John Boyne, who has described himself as a “Terf” – the acronym for trans-exclusionary radical feminist.

Two judges have also withdrawn from the prize process, and more than 800 writers and publishing industry workers have signed a statement calling on Polari to formally remove Boyne from the longlist. Boyne, who was longlisted for the main Polari book prize for his novella Earth, is best known for his 2006 novel The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas.

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Sarah Jessica Parker in possible conflict of interest over Booker longlisted author

Actor and book prize judge’s production company in process of developing novel by Claire Adam

An apparent conflict of interest has emerged over the Sex and the City star Sarah Jessica Parker’s judging of this year’s Booker prize.

A production company run by the actor is reportedly in the process of developing a book written by Claire Adam, whose second novel, Love Forms, appears on this year’s longlist, announced on Tuesday.

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Most global Booker prize longlist in a decade features Kiran Desai and Tash Aw

Chair of judges Roddy Doyle says the 13 ‘gripping’ titles in contention for the £50,000 award all ‘examine identity, individual or national’
• Comment: This year’s Booker prize longlist looks in new directions

Kiran Desai, Tash Aw and David Szalay are among the authors nominated for the 2025 Booker prize, on a longlist that features writers from nine different nationalities – the most global list for a decade.

The judging panel, which this year includes Sex and the City star Sarah Jessica Parker alongside Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀ and chair of judges Roddy Doyle, also chose books by Katie Kitamura, Andrew Miller, Ben Markovits and Jonathan Buckley as part of their “Booker dozen” longlist of 13 titles.

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Leila Aboulela wins PEN Pinter prize for writing on migration and faith

Judges praised the Sudanese author for centring Muslim women, describing her writing as “a balm, a shelter, and an inspiration”

Leila Aboulela has won this year’s PEN Pinter prize for her writing on migration, faith and the lives of women.

The prize is awarded to a writer who, in the words of the late British playwright Harold Pinter, casts an “unflinching, unswerving” gaze on the world, and shows a “fierce intellectual determination … to define the real truth of our lives and our societies”.

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