‘The Home Child’ by Liz Berry

is The Writers’ Prize Book of the Year 2024

The Home Child by Liz Berry

CATEGORY WINNERS

‘The Wren, The Wren’ by Anne Enright (Fiction)

‘Thunderclap’ by Laura Cumming (Non-Fiction)

‘The Home Child’ by Liz Berry (Poetry)

The Home Child by Liz Berry

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

Rathbones Folio Prize 2022

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.

Support Us

As a registered UK charity, we believe that literature has the capacity to fundamentally change and enrich people’s lives. If, like us, you believe that great literature matters, please consider supporting our work by clicking here. 

Raymond Antrobus, Winner of the Rathbones Folio Prize 2019

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).