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 2022 winner, Tom Benn. Tom 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.

Novelist and screenwriter, Benn has been named the winner of the 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.

Oxblood is a landmark novel shifting the perspective on male violence towards the female experience of grief, love and resilience. 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.

For over 30 years, the UK’s most influential prize for young writers has been a definitive indicator of rising literary talent in Britain and Ireland and Tom Benn joins an illustrious list of previous winners, including last year’s winner Cal Flyn, as well as Zadie Smith, Simon Armitage, Max Porter, Sally Rooney and Robert Mcfarlane.