The Sunday Times/University of Warwick Young Writer of the Year Award is awarded for a full-length published or self-published (in book or ebook formats) work of fiction, non-fiction or poetry, by an author aged 18 – 35 years. The winner receives £5,000, as well as a ten week residency at the University of Warwick and a two-year membership of the London Library. There are three prizes of £500 each for runners-up, alongside a one year membership to the London Library each. The winning book will be a work of outstanding literary merit.
The award is an annual prize, sponsored by the Sunday Times and the University of Warwick. The British Council is the international partner of the award.
The prize is administered by the Society of Authors. To apply and for more information about the prize please visit the Society of Authors website.
“For young writers, a prize makes all the difference: not just the publicity flare, or the tag-line on the paperback jacket, but the jag of confidence it brings. Someone believes in your prose, someone has prized those sentences you spent all those years laying end to end… Nothing crushes the wish to write quite like apathy; nothing boosts it quite like being read and responded to carefully. [After winning the award in 2004] I started to think I might be able to write another book – that became The Wild Places (2007), and here I am in 2015, six books down and another underway, thinking back more than a decade to the Prize, and the huge boost it gave me.”
Robert Macfarlane, winner 2004
