Debut author Harriet Baker has won the £10,000 Sunday Times Charlotte Aitken Young Writer of the Year Award for Rural Hours (Penguin), a biography of Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Rosamond Lehmann.
In the book, Baker explores the ways in which the lives of these three women were transformed after they moved to the countryside. The author has written for the London Review of Books, the TLS, the Paris Review, the New Statesman and other publications. In 2018, she was awarded the Biographers’ Club Tony Lothian Prize.
The judges chose Baker as the winner from a shortlist featuring four authors, described by Johanna Thomas-Corr, chair of judges and chief literary critic for The Times and The Sunday Times, as “unforgettable new voices in fiction and non-fiction”.
Calling it a “quietly confident debut”, Thomas-Corr said of the winning book: “Harriet Baker’s Rural Hours has made me excited about literary criticism again. She has succeeded in her task of showing how transformative country life can be for a writer’s imagination.”
The book triumphed over three other titles on the shortlist, including Fast by the Horns (Wildfire), Moses McKenzie’s novel about the Rastafari community in 1980s England, debut author Scott Preston’s folkloric adventure, The Borrowed Hills (John Murray), and Ralf Webb’s Strange Relations (Sceptre), a non-fiction debut on masculinity and bisexuality.
The shortlisted authors will each receive cash prizes of £1,000 and a year’s membership to The London Library, while the winner will get a two years’ membership.
Baker has joined recent winners Tom Crewe, Sally Rooney and Max Porter, among many other writers who have been celebrated by the prize early in their careers.
The announcement was made at a live ceremony in east London by Thomas-Corr and Sebastian Faulks, chair of the Charlotte Aitken Trust. Desmond Elliot Prize alumna Claire Adam was also on the judging panel this year, alongside Booker Prize-shortlisted author Andrew Miller, poet Victoria Adukwei Bulley, author and journalist Tomiwa Owolade, and BBC broadcaster Justin Webb.
Adam said: “Rural Hours is an accomplished work – even more astonishing for being by an author so early in her career. Every time I returned to it, I admired more deeply Baker’s ‘quality of attention’, as she examines, in exquisite detail, the lives of these three women writers.”
Administered by the Society of Authors (SoA), the Young Writer of the Year Award works with a growing network of partners, including Waterstones, which supports the shortlisted and winning titles with in-store POS and competitions, and by posting content across its platforms.
Bea Carvalho, head of Books at Waterstones, said: “Huge congratulations to Harriet Baker. The award carries significant influence and commercial promise, consistently boosting the profiles of its winners. We look forward to introducing Harriet’s wonderful book to readers far and wide following this well-deserved win.”
All four shortlisted authors spoke to former winner Zadie Smith at an event held at the Barbican Centre the night before the ceremony, as part of a new partnership for the award.
The British Council has also continued its partnership and will help the shortlisted authors forge new connections overseas, while Granta Magazine will publish a series of extracts online.
