Literature

Paul Murray for The Bee Sting - WINNER

The Bee Sting is a masterful state-of-the-nation novel about modern Ireland, told through the lens of a single family that has fallen on hard times. This is a country grappling with the aftermath of 2008’s catastrophic financial crash, alongside the looming threat of climate crisis, the destructive potential of the internet, rapidly changing norms around sexuality and queerness, religion and fanaticism, with fraying class divides, the miasma of toxic masculinity and the eternally unanswerable question of what it means to be a good man. 

Paul Murray draws these topical themes together with nuance, empathy and wit. He develops a distinct form and voice for each of his protagonists and the characters jump off the page, fully alive in personality, in their emotional lives, in all their hopes and flaws. 

Salman Rushdie for Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder 

On the morning of 12 August 2022, Salman Rushdie was standing onstage at the Chautauqua Institution in upstate New York, preparing to give a lecture on the importance of keeping writers safe from harm, when a man rushed down the aisle towards him, wielding a knife. What followed was a horrific act of violence that shook the literary world and beyond. Now, for the first time, Rushdie relives the traumatic events of that day and its aftermath, as well as his journey towards physical recovery .

Knife is Rushdie writing with urgency, gravity, and unflinching honesty. It is also a deeply moving reminder of literature’s capacity to make sense of the unthinkable. This an intimate and life-affirming meditation on life, loss, love, art – and finding the strength to stand up again

Claire Kilroy for Soldier Sailor 

Claire Kilroy takes readers deep inside the early days of motherhood. Exploring the clash of fierce love with a seismic shift in identity, Kilroy conjures the raw, tumultuous emotions of a new mother, as her marriage strains and she struggles with questions of equality, autonomy, and creativity.

A darkly funny and hugely moving portrait of a young woman and her changing psychological state over a number of years, when, as a young mother, her sense of herself is turned upside down. Tender and harrowing, Kilroy's modern masterpiece portrays parenthood in all its agony and ardent joy.