Harriet Baker Wins The Sunday Times Charlotte Aitken Trust Young Writer of the Year Award

We are delighted to have partnered once again with The Sunday Times Charlotte Aitken Trust Young Writer of the Year Award, which has just announced its 2024 winner, Harriet Baker. Harriet will benefit from two years’ London Library membership, with the shortlist receiving a year’s membership. We are proud to celebrate authors of the highest quality at the beginning of their careers and provide a critical support system to the very best talent at work right now.

Debut author Harriet Baker has been named the winner of the award for Rural Hours, a biography of Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Rosamond Lehmann.

Chair of judges, Johanna Thomas-Corr, said: “Harriet Baker’s Rural Hours has made me excited about literary criticism again. She has succeeded stunningly in her task of showing how transformative country life can be for a writer’s imagination. Every page of this quietly confident debut is inspiring, crafted as it is with deep intelligence and maturity of thought.”

In Rural Hours, Harriet Baker tells the story of three different women who moved to the countryside and were forever changed by it. Following long periods of creative uncertainty and private disappointment, each of Baker’s subjects are invigorated by new landscapes. In the country, they find their paths: to convalescence and recovery; to sexual and political awakening; and, above all, to personal freedom and creative flourishing.

Harriet Baker has written for the London Review of Books, Paris Review, New Statesman, TLS, Apollo and frieze. She read English at Oxford and holds a PhD from Queen Mary, University of London. In 2018, she was awarded the Biographers’ Club Tony Lothian Prize. Rural Hours is her first book.

For more than 30 years, the most influential prize for young writers in the UK and Ireland has been a definitive indicator of rising literary talent. Baker now joins recent winners Tom Crewe, Jay Bernard, Raymond Antrobus, Adam Weymouth, Sally Rooney, Max Porter and Sarah Howe.

In order to support members with their writing careers especially those early career writers, including our Emerging Writers Programme participants, we are compiling a collection of creative writing books. These will be classified within the Literature section, under the shelfmark L.Creative Writing. The first few books have been ordered and will appear on the shelves in the coming weeks.

The Library welcomes suggestions from members for both new and older titles that would be appropriate additions to the collection. Find out more here. 

Planning permission has now been granted for Phase One of the Library's Building Connections project. Thanks to the generosity of all those who have supported the project, we have secured the required funds to move forward to the next stage and invite tenders from building contractors. We are aiming to start the building works in late July in order to be complete by the end of December 2025.

The new room on the ground floor will be a permanent, dedicated space for a wide variety of uses that focus on our public benefit remit as a charity, such as sixth-form school visits, meetings of our Emerging Writers, exhibitions and displays, and workshops with other charitable organisations. It will provide a venue for our member special interest groups to meet in, as well as hosting speaker events, discussions, and trustee meetings, and will also be available for private hire.

In addition to this, Phase One includes creating a basement kitchen, which will enable our event caterers to stop using the Study as a field kitchen and provide a consolidated storage area for our catering supplies.

Phase One will involve work in small, contained areas of the building, away from main reading rooms and most of the collection. The Library and its architects have long experience in keeping the Library open during works and keeping disruption to a minimum and this remains a priority.

The final design work is continuing while we move to the procurement phase. In the next few months, more detailed information about the plans, designs and building works will be on the website and we will keep members up to date in the member newsletter. Visit the project website for further information and detailed FAQs.

If you have any further questions or comments please get in touch with us at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..