I am very pleased to be on the official shadow panel for this year’s Young Writer of the Year Award (sponsored by the Sunday Times, Peters Fraser + Dunlop in association with Warwick University), along with four brilliant book bloggers: Rebecca at Bookish Beck, Annabel at annabookbel, Dane at Social Bookshelves and Eleanor at Elle Thinks.
The £5,000 prize is open to UK and Irish writers aged 35 or under for a work of fiction, poetry or non-fiction of outstanding literary merit. It was relaunched in 2015 following a hiatus since 2009 and past winners include Zadie Smith, Sarah Waters, Naomi Alderman and Francis Spufford.
Max Porter won the award in 2016 for ‘Grief is the Thing With Feathers’ although last year’s official shadow panel of book bloggers chose short story collection ‘An Account of the Decline of the Great Auk, According to One Who Saw It’ by Jessie Greengrass as their winner. I am already wondering if our shadow panel will come up with the same result as the official judges. This year, they are the literary editor of the Sunday Times Andrew Holgate and writers Elif Shafak and Lucy Hughes-Hallett.
The shortlist will be announced at 9am on Sunday 29th October followed by the winner on Thursday 7th December. Follow our blogs and #YoungWriterAwardShadow as we share our thoughts over the next few weeks!
A Little Blog of Books 
Yes, it will be very interesting to see if we pick the same winner as the judges! I was thinking I’d like to try to read books by Hughes-Hallett and Shafak before potentially meeting them, and I do have one each of their novels on my Kindle…but reading those plus the shortlist could be a tall order!
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Yes, I don’t think I’ll have time either but you never know!
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This is amazing 😀 Congratulations 🎉
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Thanks!
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I’m looking forward to discussing these books with you Clare.
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Me too, looking forward to meeting next month!
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Fantastic! Max Porter’s book is one of the best books I’ve ever read, incidentally
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I really liked it too 🙂
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This is so cool – I already follow three of the shadow panel! I’m looking forward to hearing all of your thoughts.
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Thanks 🙂
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