Oxblood: Winner of the Sunday Times Charlotte Aitken Young Writer of the Year Award

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A remarkable galvanization of a time and a place, its style and substance so rooted in one another it is impossible to imagine it being written by anyone else. A story that seeps into you, sentences turned to catch the light like night eyes. A living thing' -- DOMINIC NOLAN He’s young and daft but he’s out now and now he’s out he might decide he’d rather stay out, for his nana’s cooking.’ Over the course of a few days, the Dodds women must each confront the true legacy of the men who have defined their lives; and seize the opportunity to break the cycle for good. Author and screenwriter Tom Benn has been named winner of the 2022 Sunday Times Charlotte Aitken Trust Young Writer of the Year Award for his novel, Oxblood (Bloomsbury), which explores the generational trauma caused by patriarchal violence.

The story covers a few days and also a few decades, which is handled masterfully. The parallels are so subtle that I’m only now working some of them out. There’s filth and misery, but there’s a lot of warmth and support too. The judges chose Tom Benn from a compelling shortlist of four authors, each producing innovative, forward-thinking narratives that pushed the boundaries of language and form, with Johanna Thomas-Corr commenting that each shortlisted writer had ‘set themselves free of publishing conventions’. In Larger than an Orange, Lucy Burns draws together an intimate memoir exploring the personal and public experience of abortion, in Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies, Maddie Mortimer poetically examines disease and mortality, and Katherine Rundell interrogates John Donne’s meditations on corporeal existence in the animated biography of his work, Super- Infinite (the only non-fiction title on the list). With Cal Flyn, Jay Bernard, Raymond Antrobus, Adam Weymouth, Sally Rooney, Max Porter and Sarah Howe as recent winners, the prize has spotted and supported an exceptional line-up of defining new voices since returning from a seven-year break in 2015, and its alumni list is a who’s who of the best British and Irish writing – from Robert Macfarlane to Zadie Smith, from Sarah Waters to Simon Armitage, from Naomi Alderman to Caryl Phillips and many others. And then there is Jan – the teenage tearaway running as fast as she can from her mother, her grandmother and her own unnamed baby. I recognised a lot of this description of the ‘80s while, at the same time, the life described in it is very different from what my own was at the time. This is the tale of three women of different generations in the same family, the youngest being roughly contemporaneous with me. Teenage girls, even more than now, were seen as appropriate sex objects then. You either had to veer away from it (as I did, hiding myself in oversized men’s suits and scary goth makeup) or lean into it, as love-starved Jan does here.Admire the art over the artist, the work over the worker. People transgress and disappoint but art can transgress to transcend. Which public event affected you most? The Dodds family once ruled Manchester’s underworld; now the men are dead, leaving three generations of women trapped in a house haunted by violence, harbouring an unregistered baby. Set in a council house haunted by memories of dead family members, Benn’s unflinching storytelling unearths the forgotten working class voices left in the footnotes of Manchester’s industrial history, shrouded by criminal secrecy and steeped in a powerful emotional darkness which left this year’s judges’ ‘bowled over’ and certain that Tom Benn’s talent will only continue to ‘grow and grow’. Oxblood, Benn’s fourth novel, was also longlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize 2022. His first novel, The Doll Princess (Jonathan Cape), was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize and the Portico Prize and longlisted for the CWA’s John Creasey Dagger. Sponsored by the Charlotte Aitken Trust, who enter their second year as sponsors of the prize, the award is given annually to the best work of fiction, non-fiction or poetry by a British or Irish author of 35 or under.

Novelist and screenwriter Tom Benn, has been named winner of the 2022 Sunday Times Charlotte Aitken Young Writer of the Year Award for Oxblood, a novel that judge Oyinkan Braithwaite called a ‘bountiful, fearless work of literary art’, daringly exploring masculine violence and fractured female agency through the domestic lives of three generations of working-class women in 1980s Manchester. To me, genres are ever-evolving narrative frameworks that expose our fears and fantasies, offering writers trenchant tools to interrogate, repurpose and vandalise. We might turn to genre for comfort: to escape the tedium, uncertainty and injustice of reality; but genre can also confront these horrors, directly or askance, and say something troubling and truthful about them. What projects are you working on?Oxblood is one of those rare books where place and time are conjured so effortlessly, the caste of characters are drawn with so much ease and grace… Tom Benn is a seriously gifted writer and I’m keen to read whatever he does next.‘ The Barrows were not as steeped in crime as the Dodds - but I can hear the echoes of my own childhood. From a standout scholar, a biography of John Donne: the poet of love, sex, and death. In Super-Infinite, Katherine Rundell embarks on a fleet-footed ‘act of evangelism’, showing us the many sides of Donne’s extraordinary life, his obsessions, his blazing words, and his tempestuous Elizabethan times – unveiling Donne as the most remarkable mind and as a lesson in living. The Sunday Times described the shortlisters as ‘four dazzling risk-takers’ and Tom Benn as ‘a master of Northern Noir’. Chair of Judges Andrew Holgate said: ‘Four very strong voices and four immensely powerful books. This is a terrific shortlist, one that more than lives up to the great traditions of this prize and its mission to find and spotlight distinctive new voices that will flourish in the future. I feel very confident about the way forward for all of these authors, and choosing between them for the winner is going to be extremely difficult.’