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.