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The Betty Trask Prize and Awards are for first novels written by authors under the age of 35 who reside in a current or former Commonwealth nation. Each year the awards total at least £20,000, with normally one author receiving a larger prize amount (£10,000 in very recent years), called the "Prize", and the remainder given to other writers, called the "Awards".[1] These were established in 1984 by the Society of Authors at the bequest of the late Betty Trask, a reclusive author of over thirty romance novels.[2] They're given to traditional or romantic novels, rather than those of an experimental style, and either published or unpublished works.[3]
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1980s
| Year | Author | Title | Prize |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1984 | Ronald Frame | Winter Journey | £6,750 |
| Clare Nonhebel | Cold Showers | £6,750 | |
| James Buchan | A Parish of Rich Women | £1,000 | |
| Helen Harris | Playing Fields in Winter | £1,000 | |
| Gareth Jones | The Disinherited | £1,000 | |
| Simon Rees | The Devil's Looking Glass | £1,000 | |
| 1985 | Susan Kay | Legacy | £12,500 |
| Gary Armitage | A Season of Peace | £1,000 | |
| Elizabeth Ironside | A Very Private Enterprise | £1,000 | |
| Alice Mitchell | Instead of Eden | £1,000 | |
| George Schweiz | The Earth Abides For Ever | £1,000 | |
| Caroline Stickland | The Standing Hills | £1,000 | |
| 1986 | Tim Parks | Tongues of Flame | £9,000 |
| Patricia Ferguson | Family, Myths and Legends | £4,500 | |
| Philippa Blake | Mzungu's Wife | £1,000 | |
| Matthew Kneale | Whore Banquets | £1,000 | |
| J. F. McLaughlin | The Road to Dilmun | £1,000 | |
| Kate Saunders | The Prodigal Father | £1,000 | |
| 1987 | James Maw | Hard Luck | £8,000 |
| Peter Benson | The Levels | £4,500 | |
| Helen Flint | Return Journey | £4,500 | |
| Catherine Arnold | Lost Time | £1,000 | |
| H. S. Bhabra | Gestures | £1,000 | |
| Lucy Pinney | The Pink Stallion | £1,000 | |
| 1988 | Alex Martin | The General Interruptor MS | £6,500 |
| Candia McWilliam | A Case of Knives | £6,500 | |
| Georgina Andrewes | Behind the Waterfall | £2,000 | |
| James Friel | Left of North | £2,000 | |
| Glenn Patterson | Burning Your Own | £2,000 | |
| Susan Webster | Small Tales of a Town | £2,000 | |
| 1989 | Nigel Watts | The Life Game | £10,000 |
| William Riviere | Watercolour Sky | £5,000 | |
| Paul Houghton | Harry's Last Wedding | £2,000 | |
| Alasdair McKee | Uncle Henry's Last Stand | £2,000 |
1990s
| Year | Author | Title | Prize |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1990 | Robert McLiam Wilson | Ripley Bogle | £16,000 |
| Elizabeth Chadwick | The Wild Hunt | £3,000 | |
| Rosemary Cohen | No Strange Land | £3,000 | |
| Nicholas Shakespeare | The Vision of Elena Silves | £3,000 | |
| 1991 | Amit Chaudhuri | A Strange and Sublime Address | £10,000 |
| Mark Swallow | Teaching Little Fang | £7,000 | |
| Suzannah Dunn | Quite Contrary | £2,000 | |
| Lesley Glaister | Honour Thy Father | £2,000 | |
| Simon Mason | The Great English Nude | £2,000 | |
| Nino Ricci | Lives of the Saints | £2,000 | |
| 1992 | Peter M. Rosenburg | Kissing Through a Pane of Glass | £5,000 |
| Tibor Fischer | Under the Frog | £3,000 | |
| Liane Jones | The Dream Stone | £3,000 | |
| Eugene Mullan | The Last of His Line | £3,000 | |
| Edward St Aubyn | Never Mind | £3,000 | |
| 1993 | Mark Blackaby | You'll Never be Here Again | £10,000 |
| Andrew Cowan | Pig | £7,000 | |
| Simon Corrigan | Tommy Was Here | £5,000 | |
| Joanna Briscoe | Mothers and Other Lovers | £2,000 | |
| Olivia Fane | Landing on Clouds | £2,000 | |
| 1994 | Colin Bateman | Divorcing Jack | £12,000 |
| Nadeem Aslam | Season of the Rainbirds | £10,000 | |
| Guy Burt | After the Hole | £1,000 | |
| Frances Liardet | The Game | £1,000 | |
| Jonathan Rix | Some Hope | £1,000 | |
| 1995 | Robert Newman | Dependence Day | £10,000 |
| Mark Behr | The Smell of Apples | £8,000 | |
| Martina Evans | Midnight Feast | £3,000 | |
| Rohit Manchanda | A Speck of Coaldust | £1,000 | |
| Juliet Thomas | Hallelujah Jordan | £1,000 | |
| Philippa Walshe | The Latecomer | £1,000 | |
| Madeleine Wickham | The Tennis Party | £1,000 | |
| 1996 | John Lanchester | The Debt to Pleasure | £8,000 |
| Meera Syal | Anita and Me | £7,000 | |
| Rhidian Brook | The Testimony of Taliesin Jones | £5,000 | |
| Louis Caron Buss | The Luxury of Exile | £5,000 | |
| 1997 | Alex Garland | The Beach | £12,000 |
| Josie Barnard | Poker Face | £5,000 | |
| Ardashir Vakil | Beach Boy | £5,000 | |
| Diran Adebayo | Some Kind of Black | £1,500 | |
| Sanjida O'Connell | Theory of Mind | £1,500 | |
| 1998 | Kiran Desai | Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard | £10,000 |
| Nick Earls | Zig Zag Street | £8,000 | |
| Phil Whitaker | Eclipse of the Sun | £5,000 | |
| Tobias Hill | Underground | £1,000 | |
| Gail Anderson-Dargatz | The Cure for Death by Lightning | £1,000 | |
| 1999 | Elliot Perlman | Three Dollars | £7,000 |
| Catherine Chidgey | In a Fishbone Church | £6,000 | |
| Giles Foden | The Last King of Scotland | £4,000 | |
| Dennis Bock | Olympia | £3,000 | |
| Rajeev Balasubramanyam | In Beautiful Disguises | £2,500 | |
| Sarah Waters | Tipping the Velvet | £1,000 |
2000s
Since 2009, the Betty Trask Prize has been given to a single author; the remaining receive the Betty Trask Award. A blue ribbon (
) indicates the winner for that year.
| Year | Author | Title | Prize | Ref. |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2000 | Jonathan Tulloch | The Season Ticket | £10,000 | |
| Julia Leigh | The Hunter | £7,000 | ||
| Susan Elderkin | Sunset Over Chocolate Mountains | £4,000 | ||
| Galaxy Craze | By the Shore | £2,000 | ||
| Nicholas Griffin | The Requiem Shark | £2,000 | ||
| 2001 | Zadie Smith | White Teeth | £8,000 | |
| Justin Hill | The Drink and Dream Teahouse | £5,000 | ||
| Maggie O'Farrell | After You'd Gone | £5,000 | ||
| Vivien Kelly | Take One Young Man | £4,000 | ||
| Mohsin Hamid | Moth Smoke | £2,500 | ||
| Patrick Neate | Musungu Jim and the Great Chief Tuloko | £2,500 | ||
| 2002 | Hari Kunzru | The Impressionist | £8,000 | [4] |
| Rachel Seiffert | The Dark Room | £5,000 | ||
| Shamim Sarif | The World Unseen | £4,000 | ||
| Helen Cross | My Summer of Love | £2,000 | ||
| Chloe Hooper | A Child's Book of True Crime | £2,000 | ||
| Susanna Jones | The Earthquake Bird | £2,000 | ||
| Gwendoline Riley | Cold Water | £2,000 | ||
| 2003 | Jon McGregor | If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things | £10,000 | |
| Sarah Hall | Haweswater | £6,000 | ||
| Stephanie Merritt | Gaveston | £4,000 | ||
| Elizabeth Garner | Nightdancing | £2,000 | ||
| Zoë Strachan | Negative Space | £2,000 | ||
| Adam Thirlwell | Politics | £1,000 | ||
| 2004 | Louise Dean | Becoming Strangers | £8,000 | |
| Hannah MacDonald | The Sun Road | £6,000 | ||
| Anthony Cartwright | The Afterglow | £3,000 | ||
| Siddharth Dhanvant Sanghvi | The Last Song of Dusk | £3,000 | ||
| 2005 | Susan Fletcher | Eve Green | £16,000 | |
| Diana Evans | 26a | £2,000 | ||
| Helen Walsh | Brass | £2,000 | ||
| 2006 | Nick Laird | Utterly Monkey | £10,000 | |
| Peter Hobbs | The Short Day Dying | £5,000 | ||
| Nicola Monaghan | The Killing Jar | £5,000 | ||
| 2007 | Will Davis | My Side of the Story | £10,000 | |
| Adam Foulds | The Truth About These Strange Times | £2,500 | ||
| Cynan Jones | The Long Dry | £2,500 | ||
| Julie Maxwell | You Can Live Forever | £2,500 | ||
| Karen Mcleod | In Search of the Missing Eyelash | £2,500 | ||
| 2008 | David Szalay | London and the South | £10,000 | |
| Ross Raisin | God's Own Country | £6,000 | ||
| Thomas Leveritt | The Exchange Rate Between Love and Money | £2,000 | ||
| Anna Ralph | The Floating Island | £2,000 | ||
| 2009 | Samantha Harvey |
The Wilderness | £12,000 | |
| Eleanor Catton | The Rehearsal | £8,000 |
2010s
| Year | Author | Title | Prize | Ref. |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2010 | Nadifa Mohamed | Black Mamba Boy | £10,000 | |
| Evie Wyld | After the Fire, A Still Small Voice | £7,000 | ||
| Jenn Ashworth | A Kind of Intimacy | £1,500 | ||
| Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani | I Do Not Come to You By Chance | £1,500 | ||
| 2011 | Anjali Joseph | Saraswati Park | £10,000 | [5] |
| Laura Barton | Twenty-One Locks | £6,000 | ||
| Simon Lelic | Rupture | £2,500 | ||
| Robert Williams | Luke and Jon | £2,500 | ||
| 2012 | David Whitehouse | Bed | £8,000 | |
| Kalinda Ashton | The Danger Game | £3,000 | ||
| Elizabeth Day | Scissors, Paper, Stone | £3,000 | ||
| Annabel Pitcher | My Sister Lives on the Mantelpiece | £3,000 | ||
| Emma Jane Unsworth | Hungry the Stars and Everything | £3,000 | ||
| 2013 | Grace McCleen | The Land of Decoration | £8,000 | |
| Chibundu Onuzo | The Spider King's Daughter | £7,000 | ||
| Francesca Segal | The Innocents | £2,500 | ||
| Will Wiles | Care of Wooden Floors | £2,500 | ||
| 2014 | Nathan Filer | The Shock of the Fall | £10,000 | [6] |
| NoViolet Bulawayo | We Need New Names | £3,750 | ||
| Sam Byers | Idiopathy | £3,750 | ||
| Mave Fellowes | Chaplin and Company | £3,750 | ||
| Matt Greene | Ostrich | £3,750 | ||
| 2015 | Ben Fergusson | The Spring of Kasper Meier | £10,000 | [7] |
| Emma Healey | Elizabeth Is Missing | £5,000 | ||
| Zoe Pilger | Eat My Heart Out | £5,000 | ||
| Simon Wroe | Chop Chop | £5,000 | ||
| 2016 | Alex Christofi | Glass | £10,000 | [8] |
| Irenosen Okojie | Butterfly Fish | £5,000 | ||
| Natasha Pulley | The Watchmaker of Filigree Street | £5,000 | ||
| Lucy Wood | Wood for Weathering | £5,000 | ||
| 2017 | Daniel Shand | Fallow | £10,000 | [8] |
| Rowan Hisayo Buchanan | Harmless Like You | £3,000 | ||
| Elnathan John | Born on a Tuesday | £3,000 | ||
| Kathleen Jowitt | Speak Its Name | £3,000 | ||
| Rob McCarthy | The Hollow Men | £3,000 | ||
| Barney Norris | Five Rivers Met on a Wooded Plain | £3,000 | ||
| 2018 | Omar Robert Hamilton | The City Always Wins | £10,000 | |
| Sarah Day | Mussolini's Island | £3,250 | ||
| Clare Fisher | All the Good Things | £3,250 | ||
| Eli Goldstone | Strange Heart Beating | £3,250 | ||
| Lloyd Markham | Bad Ideas/Chemicals | £3,250 | ||
| Masande Ntshanga | The Reactive | £3,250 | ||
| 2019 | James Clarke | The Litten Path | £10,000 | |
| Samuel Fisher | The Chameleon | £2,700 | ||
| Imogen Hermes Gowar | The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock | £2,700 | ||
| Ruqaya Izzidien | The Watermelon Boys | £2,700 | ||
| Daisy Lafarge | Paul | £2,700 | ||
| Rebecca Ley | Sweet Fruit, Sour Land | £2,700 | ||
| Sophie Mackintosh | The Water Cure | £2,700 |
2020s
| Year | Author | Title | Prize | Ref. |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 | Kathryn Hind | Hitch | £10,000 | [9] |
| Stacey Halls | The Familiars | £5,400 | ||
| Isabella Hammad | The Parisian | £5,400 | ||
| Okeychukwu Nzelu | The Private Joys of Nnenna Maloney | £5,400 | ||
| 2021 | Thomas McMullan | The Last Good Man | ||
| Graeme Armstrong | The Young Team | |||
| Maame Blue | Bad Love | |||
| Kiran Millwood Hargrave | The Mercies | |||
| Eley Williams | The Liar’s Dictionary | |||
| Nneoma Ike-Njoku | The Water House | |||
| 2022 | Will McPhail | IN: The Graphic Novel | [10] | |
| A. K. Blakemore | The Manningtree Witches | |||
| Natasha Brown | Assembly | |||
| Caleb Azumah Nelson | Open Water | |||
| Megan Nolan | Acts of Desperation | |||
| 2023 | Daniel Wiles | Mercia's Take | £10,000 | [11] |
| Paddy Crewe | My Name Is Yip | |||
| Imogen Crimp | A Very Nice Girl | |||
| Maddie Mortimer | Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies | |||
| 2024 | Tom Crewe | The New Life | £10,000 | [12] |
| Stephen Buoro | The Five Sorrowful Mysteries of Andy Africa | |||
| Rachel Connolly | Lazy City | |||
| Rachel Dawson | Neon Roses | |||
| C. E. McGill | Our Hideous Progeny | |||
| Nathan Munday | Whaling |
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