‘The Home Child’ by Liz Berry
is The Writers’ Prize Book of the Year 2024
CATEGORY WINNERS
‘The Wren, The Wren’ by Anne Enright (Fiction)
‘Thunderclap’ by Laura Cumming (Non-Fiction)
‘The Home Child’ by Liz Berry (Poetry)
The 2024 Writers’ Prize Shortlist
Fiction
The Wren, The Wren
by Anne Enright
The Bee Sting
by Paul Murray
The Fraud
by Zadie Smith
Non-Fiction
Thunderclap
by Laura Cumming
Doppelganger
by Naomi Klein
A Thread of Violence
by Mark O’Connell
Poetry
Self-Portrait as Othello
by Jason Allen-Paisant
The Home Child
by Liz Berry
Bright Fear
by Mary Jean Chan
About Us
More than Just a Prize: the Literature Prize Foundation
Our activities don’t stop with the Prize. Our ground-breaking mentorship scheme, run in partnership with First Story, has worked with dozens of emerging writers from disadvantaged communities since its inception in 2017.
Furthermore, our partnership with UEA allows a Writers’ Prize-winning or shortlisted author to take up a Visiting Fellowship each year; the current fellow is Sunjeev Sahota, shortlisted in 2022 for his novel China Room.
Current Projects
We work with spinal injuries charity Horatio’s Garden on a writing for wellbeing scheme, while our partnership with the University of Chichester’s Ukrainian Digital Writer in Residence gave a voice in English to eminent Ukrainian author Volodymyr Rafeienko.
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The Prize
First awarded in 2014, The Writers’ Prize – formerly The Rathbones Folio Prize – is open to all works of literature written in English and published in the UK. The author of the Book of the Year is awarded £30,000, and each category winner is awarded £2,000. All genres and all forms of literature are eligible, except work written primarily for children.
The Prize is unique in that it is judged by members of the 350-strong Folio Academy of esteemed writers and critics.
Prize winners to date are: Tenth of December by George Saunders (2014); Family Life by Akhil Sharma (2015); The Return by Hisham Matar (2017); Ghosts of the Tsunami by Richard Lloyd Parry (2018); The Perseverance by Raymond Antrobus (2019, pictured above); Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli (2020); In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado (2021); The Magician by Colm Tóibín (2022); Constructing a Nervous System by Margo Jefferson (2023); and The Home Child by Liz Berry (2024).