The Sunday Times / University of Warwick Young Writer of the Year Award 2020 Winner
It is our great pleasure to confirm Jay Bernard as the winner of the Sunday Times / University of Warwick Young Writer of the Year Award 2020 for Surge.
Taking the New Cross fire of 1981 as a jumping-off point for a trenchant exploration of injustice, prejudice and the turbulence of Black British identity in the forty years since, Bernard’s masterful collection invokes Jamaican patois and the rhythms of the dancehall to craft a richly evocative verse-world.
‘Surge reads and feels like a unified whole… These poems evoke a lost past while nodding pointedly to the struggles of the present.’
Houman Barekat, Judge
Since 1991, the Young Writer of the Year Award has become perhaps our most prescient bellwether of future talent, with previous winners including Simon Armitage, Zadie Smith, Max Porter and Sally Rooney.
The Shortlist
An astounding, incendiary collection that takes the New Cross Fire of 1981 as a jumping-off point for an exploration of injustice, prejudice and the turbulence of Black lives in the decades since.
Balanced between the utmost darkness and hope, Cho’s piercing account of psychosis and motherhood is a powerful meditation on what it means to understand oneself.
Psychologically astute and dryly funny, Exciting Times delivers an enthralling dissection of love, commitment, power and privilege in the international circles of contemporary Hong Kong.
Burning with spiritual intensity, Hewitt’s debut collection probes weighty themes with a self-assurance and lightness of touch astonishing for a first publication.
Set in a quiet village in South of France and charting the relationship between a dying patriarch and his young nurse, Nightingale is a stirring depiction of finding passion at death’s door.
Previous Winners
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