Literature Nominations 2025
Sally Rooney - WINNER
Intermezzo
Sally Rooney’s latest novel is a quietly devastating exploration of grief, desire, and emotional dislocation. The book follows two brothers - Peter, a guarded and successful Dublin lawyer, and Ivan, a socially withdrawn chess prodigy - in the wake of their father’s death. What unfolds is not a singular story of mourning, but a dual study of intimacy under pressure: the strained connections between lovers, siblings, and the parts of ourselves we hide.
With emotional precision, understated structure and psychological depth, the novel resists easy resolutions, instead lingering in the pauses and ruptures between life’s defining moments - its intermezzos.
With restraint, subtlety and grace, Rooney crafts a work that is both formally elegant and profoundly humane.
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Gwyneth Lewis
Nightshade Mother: A Disentangling
Nightshade Mother is a powerful and unflinching memoir from Gwyneth Lewis, the first National Poet of Wales, charting a lifetime of emotional survival and creative resistance. Written in dialogue with the diaries she has kept since childhood, the book explores her coercive and psychologically abusive relationship with her mother, interrogating trauma not as a fixed story, but as a process of reckoning, healing, and return.
What emerges is a profoundly original work: part literary memoir, part psychological excavation, and part lyric meditation. Gwyneth co-writes with her younger self in an unexpected and life-saving dialogue through time.
Nightshade Mother is a profoundly moving and beautiful work; questing, forgiving and loving in its approach.
Alan Hollinghurst
Our Evenings
A luminous portrait of modern Britain told through the life of Dave Win - a half-Burmese scholarship boy turned actor. The novel spans five decades of social upheaval, from the tentative debates around homosexuality in the 1960s to the devastation of the AIDS crisis and beyond.
With piercing elegance, Hollinghurst captures the daily negotiations of identity, desire, and belonging, tracing how private lives are shaped by public forces. Dave’s experiences of racism, homophobia, love, and ambition unfold against a backdrop of shifting British values.
Formally rich and politically resonant, Our Evenings is a profound meditation on identity and belonging, told with humour, compassion, and searing insight. This is a bold and timely work of art.
