Oxblood: Winner of the Sunday Times Charlotte Aitken Young Writer of the Year Award

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Sebastian Faulks said: “ The Charlotte Aitken Trust would like to thank the judges of this year’s award for producing such an outstanding shortlist. It is a showcase for the vitality and range of talent in a younger generation. Tom Benn’s novel Oxblood is a worthy winner, though the prize could have gone to any of the shortlist — which must have made the judges’ task especially hard. We warmly congratulate all four authors and look forward to watching their careers blossom.” Oyinkan Braithwaite said: “Oxblood is a propulsive, bountiful, fearless work of literary art. The female characters at the heart of Benn’s tale are single-minded, dogged and so completely convinced of themselves and their actions, that the reader is persuaded to be stirred by them and to remember them. It is clear that this is only the beginning for Tom Benn. His work is a vehicle for that rare unflinching look at our rawness, our brutality and our vulnerability.”

His novel OXBLOOD was published in April 2022 and was longlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize 2022 and the 2023 CWA Gold Dagger Award. He won the 2022 Sunday Times Charlotte Aitken Young Writer of the Year Award. And then there is Jan - the teenage tearaway running as fast as she can from her mother, her grandmother, and her own unnamed baby.Literary editor for The Sunday Times and judge Johanna Thomas-Corr said Benn is “one of publishing’s best kept secrets” and “his story about the struggles of three generations of women in a Manchester crime clan has been rendered with such care and specificity that it feels wholly original”. When I first moved to Norwich from Manchester at 18, I was dismissive of how small and slow the place seemed by comparison. But it’s a regional outlier innovating from the margins, welcoming and incubating talent from everywhere. Now I teach creative writing part-time at the University of East Anglia. It’s the city to hide out in and write books. What is your favourite quotation?

Cheers. It couldn’t be more surreal and encouraging to win an award that has championed so many writers whose work means something to me. Tell us about your latest novel, Oxblood. It took eight years to write? With Cal Flyn, Jay Bernard, Raymond Antrobus, Adam Weymouth, Sally Rooney, Max Porter and Sarah Howe as recent winners, the prize has spotted and supported an exceptional line-up of defining new voices since returning from a seven-year break in 2015, and its alumni list is a who’s who of the best British and Irish writing – from Robert Macfarlane to Zadie Smith, from Sarah Waters to Simon Armitage, from Naomi Alderman to Caryl Phillips and many others. From a standout scholar, a biography of John Donne: the poet of love, sex, and death. In Super-Infinite, Katherine Rundell embarks on a fleet-footed ‘act of evangelism’, showing us the many sides of Donne’s extraordinary life, his obsessions, his blazing words, and his tempestuous Elizabethan times – unveiling Donne as the most remarkable mind and as a lesson in living. Something gleeful and malevolent is moving in Lia’s body, learning her life from the inside out. A shape-shifter. A disaster tourist. It ’s travelling down the banks of her canals. It ’s spreading.The British Council will be advocating the shortlisted authors to international audiences and helping them to forge new literary connections oversees. Carol’s sister-in-law; her latest letter: a tepid postcard which had arrived a fortnight ago and lived amid the saints on her clean, crowded mantelpiece of votives, idols, trinkets, bibelots, blurry snaps of Pope John Paul II in Heaton Park, and other notes from Eunice, who had emigrated to Canada, intact. Some of Eunice’s bleached correspondences Nedra hid in her bedside drawer after months on the mantel. But Carol didn’t know why. My father was a police constable who was stationed at Longsight (and, for a time, at Benchill) and so, even though he would never have shared the reality of his job over the dinner table, as a teenager in the 60's I was savvy enough to sense some of what he was experiencing. Occasionally he would return home with his hand in plaster, after helping to beat a drunken Irishman into his cell. Wythenshawe, South Manchester. 1985. The Dodds family once ruled Manchester's underworld; now the men are dead, leaving three generations of women trapped in a house haunted by violence, harbouring an unregistered baby and the ghost of a murdered lover. My one slight criticism is that the setup (whilst important to give context to the characters) phase of the book laboured the point a little. Without giving anything away, I'll just say I pushed myself through the first half of the book a little bit, but read the second half more or less in one sitting.