Young Writer of the Year Award

The Sunday Times Charlotte Aitken Young Writer of the Year Award is awarded for a full-length published or self-published (in book or ebook formats) work of fiction, non-fiction or poetry, by an author aged 18 – 35 years. The winner receives £10,000. There are three prizes of £1000 each for runners-up. The winning book will be a work of outstanding literary merit. The award is an annual prize, sponsored by the Sunday Times and the Charlotte Aitken Trust. The prize is administered by the Society of Authors.

The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award is awarded for the previous year, for example in 2025 the 2024 Award will be voted for, and announced.

WINNER 2026

Year of the Rat

Shukman, Harry ISBN: 9781529953213
Paperback / softback

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Harry Shukman led a double life. Friends and family knew him as a journalist, but unbeknownst to them he was secretly infiltrating the British far right.

Equipped with a hidden camera, he posed as 'Chris' and set out to expose right-wing extremists. From canvassing with Britain First to befriending Holocaust deniers, neo-Nazis and a Silicon Valley-backed race-science organisation, Shukman again and again risked his safety and sanity to remove the far right’s terrifyingly everyday mask. Now, we must ensure it stays off.

- Browns Books Synopsis

Shortlist 2026

Brooks, Ben ISBN: 9781398542211
Hardback

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Johal, Gurnaik ISBN: 9781788169493
Paperback / softback

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Ni Chuinn, Liadan ISBN: 9781803513294
Paperback / softback

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Shukman, Harry ISBN: 9781784746049
Hardback

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“For young writers, a prize makes all the difference: not just the publicity flare, or the tag-line on the paperback jacket, but the jag of confidence it brings. Someone believes in your prose, someone has prized those sentences you spent all those years laying end to end… Nothing crushes the wish to write quite like apathy; nothing boosts it quite like being read and responded to carefully. [After winning the award in 2004] I started to think I might be able to write another book – that became The Wild Places (2007), and here I am in 2015, six books down and another underway, thinking back more than a decade to the Prize, and the huge boost it gave me.”

- Robert Macfarlane, Winner 2004