The Betty Trask Award for a first novel given by the Society of Authors to citizens of the Commonwealth under the age of 35. The awards have been established since 1984 and total £25,000 each year. The prizes are awarded to traditional or romantic novels, while those of an experimental nature are excluded. Awards are given for both published and unpublished works. They are funded from a bequest by the late Betty Trask, a reclusive author of over thirty romance novels.
2009 Samantha Harvey The Wilderness (Cape)
It's Jake's birthday. He is sitting in a small plane, being flown over landscape that has been the backdrop to his life - his childhood, his marriage, his work, his passions. Now he is in his early sixties, and he isn't quite the man he used to be. He has lost his wife, his son is in prison, and he is about to lose his past. Jake has Alzheimer's. As the disease takes hold of him, Jake struggles to hold on to his personal story, to his memories and identity, but they become increasingly elusive and unreliable. What happened to his daughter? Is she alive, or long dead? And why exactly is his son in prison? What went so wrong in his life? There was a cherry tree once, and a yellow dress, but what exactly do they mean? As Jake, assisted by 'poorEleanor', a childhood friend with whom for some unfathomable reason he seems to be sleeping, fights the inevitable dying of the light, the key events of his life keep changing as he tries to grasp them, and what until recently More
About the Author
Samantha Harveywas born in Kent and has lived in Ireland, New Zealand and Japan – writing, travelli
ng and teaching. She has an MA in Philosophy and completed with distinction the Bath Spa Creative Writing MA course in 2005, where she was shortlisted for the PFD prize. She now lives in Bath and recently co-founded an environmental charity.
£12,000 Eleanor Catton The Rehearsal (Granta) £8,000.
>A high-school sex scandal jolts a group of teenage girls into a new awareness of their own potency and power. The sudden and total publicity seems to turn every act into a performance and every platform into a stage. But when the local drama school decides to turn the scandal into a show, the real world and the world of the theater are forced to meet, and soon the boundaries between private and public begin to dissolve. The Rehearsal is an exhilarating and provocative novel about the unsimple mess of human desire, More2008 Winners
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David Szalay London and the South-East £10,000
Paul Rainey is a 40-year-old functioning alcoholic on anti-anxiety medication who commutes into London every day from Hove to sell advertising space in non-existent trade publications. Perceiving through a fog of psychoactive substances his own dissatisfaction with where his life is going - he only wishes there were something to be done about it. More
Ross Raisin God's Own Country £6,000
Expelled from the local school for an incident that shadows him still, Sam Marsdyke works the flock of a remote hill farm on the Yorkshire Moors, under the brooding presence of his father. From a distance, the son watches as wide-eyed ramblers march past his farm and "towns" move in from the cities and transform his landscape - buying up local farms as second homes and filling the valley with glishy new bars and delicatessens. More
Thomas Leveritt The Exchange Rate Between Love and Money £2,000
Sarajevo, 2003. Best friends Frito and Bannerman roll into town, in search of the fortune they missedout on in the dot-com years. For a while it seems that soaking up reconstruction money isn't the worst plan ever. But then they meet Clare, a prosecutor with the international war crimes tribunal, and realise she is the best person they've met. More
Anna Ralph The Floating Island £2,000
Betty Trask Prizes and Awards past winners
for first novels by authors under the age of 35 1984-2007
2007
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Will Davis My Side of the Story £10,000
Sex, drugs and gay bars: a twenty-first-century coming-of-age tale So what if your parents hate each other and want you to have therapy? So what if your holier-than-thou sister (aka The Nun) and her posse have decided you're going to hell? MoreAdam Foulds The Truth About These Strange Times - £2,500
A brilliant, touching and funny debut about an extraordinary friendship, a kidnapping, memory championships and a Russian bride Saul Dawson-Smith can memorise the sequence of a shuffled deck of cards in under a minute; he can recite pi to a... More
Cynan Jones The Long Dry- £2,500
Explodes the paradox of emotional isolation suffered by those living close together, the conflicting demands of family and farm, and this disruption of old ways by the new. Waking up early to check the cattle, Gareth notices one of the calving... More
Julie Maxwell You Can Live Forever - £2,500
Alice has been promised immortality and paradise as a member of the true religion of The Unbelievable Potential of Human Beings. Her mother is a pillar of the church and her brother is a deacon. But Alice is faltering; she's losing the knack of.. More
Karen Mcleod In Search of the Missing Eyelash £2,500
Lizzie is lonely. Her parents have gone and her brother, who believes he's a woman, is missing. Most of all, though, Lizzie misses Sally, her lover who has gone off with a man with a fat neck. She starts to stalk Sally, collecting dust and pubes... More
2006 Nick Laird Utterly Monkey (Fourth Estate/Harper Perennial) £10,000 Peter Hobbs The Short Day Dying (Faber & Faber) £5,000 Nicola Monaghan The Killing Jar (Chatto & Windus) £5,000
2005 Susan Fletcher Eve Green (Fourth Estate) £16,000 Diana Evans 26a (Chatto & Windus) £2,000 Helen Walsh Brass (Canongate) £2,000
2004 Louise Dean Becoming Strangers (Scribner) £8,000 Hannah MacDonald The Sun Road (Little, Brown) £6,000 Anthony Cartwright The Afterglow (Tindal Street Press) £3,000 Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi The Last Song of Dusk (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) £3,000
2003 Jon McGregor If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things (Bloomsbury) £10,000 Sarah Hall Haweswater (Faber and Faber) £6,000 Stephanie Merritt Gaveston (Faber and Faber) £4,000 Elizabeth Garner Nightdancing (Headline) £2,000 Zoe Strachan Negative Space (Picador) £2,000 Adam Thirlwell Politics (Jonathan Cape) £1,000
2002 Hari Kunzru The Impressionist (Hamish Hamilton) £8,000 Rachel Seiffert The Dark Room (William Heinemann) £5,000 Shamim Sarif The World Unseen (The Women’s Press) £4,000 Helen Cross My Summer of Love (Bloomsbury) £2,000 Chloe Hooper A Child’s Book of True Crime (Jonathan Cape) £2,000 Susanna Jones The Earthquake Bird (Picador) £2,000 Gwendoline Riley Cold Water (Jonathan Cape) £2,000
2001 Zadie Smith White Teeth (Hamish Hamilton) £6,000 Justin Hill The Drink and Dream Teahouse (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) £5,000 Maggie O’Farrell After You’d Gone (Headline Review) £5,000 Vivien Kelly Take One Young Man (Arrow) £4,000 Mohsin Hamid Moth Smoke (Granta) £2,500 Patrick Neate Musungu Jim and the Great Chief Tuloko (Penguin) £2,500
2000 Jonathan Tulloch The Season Ticket (Jonathan Cape) £10,000 Julia Leigh The Hunter (Faber and Faber) £7,000 Susan Elderkin Sunset Over Chocolate Mountains (Fourth Estate) £4,000 Galaxy Craze By The Shore (Jonathan Cape) £2,000 Nicholas Griffin The Requiem Shark (Little, Brown) £2,000
1999 Elliot Perlman Three Dollars (Faber and Faber) £7,000 Catherine Chidgey In a Fishbone Church (Picador Macmillan) £6,000 Giles Foden The Last King of Scotland (Faber and Faber) £4,000 Dennis Bock Olympia (Bloomsbury) £3,000 Rajeev Balasubramanyam In Beautiful Disguises (unpublished ms, to be published by Bloomsbury) £2,500 Sarah Waters Tipping the Velvet (Virago) £1,000
1998 Kiran Desai Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard (Faber and Faber) £10,000 Nick Earls Zigzag Street (Macmillan) £8,000 Phil Whitaker Eclipse of the Sun (Phoenix House) £5,000 Gail Anderson-Dargatz The Cure for Death by Lighting (Virago) £1,000 Tobias Hill Underground (unpublished MS) £1,000
1997 Alex Garland The Beach (Viking) £12,000 Josie Barnard Poker Face (Virago) £5,000 Ardashir Vakil Beach Boy (Hamish Hamilton) £5,000 Diran Adebayo Some Kind of Black (Virago) £1,500 Sanjida O’Connell Theory of Mind (Black Swan) £1,500
1996 John Lanchester The Debt to Pleasure (Macmillan) £8,000 Meera Syal Anita and Me (Flamingo) £7,000 Rhidian Brook The Testimony of Taliesin Jones (Flamingo) £5,000 Louis Caron Buss The Luxury of Exile (Jonathan Cape) £5,000
1995 Robert Newman Dependence Day (Century) £10,000 Mark BehrThe Smell of Apples (Little, Brown) £8,000 Martina Evans Midnight Feast (unpublished MS, accepted by Heinemann) £3,000 Rohit ManchandaA Speck of Coaldust (unpublished MS) £1,000 Juliet Thomas Hallelujah Jordan (unpublished MS) £1,000 Philippa Walshe The Latecomer (unpublished MS) £1,000 Madeleine Wickham The Tennis Party (Black Swan) £1,000
1994 Colin Bateman Divorcing Jack (proof HarperCollins) £12,000 Nadeem Aslam Season of the Rainbirds (Andre Deutsch) £10,000 Guy Burt After the Hole (Transworld) £1,000 Frances Liardet The Game (Macmillan) £1,000 Jonathan Rix Some Hope (Andre Deutsch) £1,000
1993 Mark Blackaby You’ll Never be Here Again (Gollancz) £10,000 Andrew Cowan Pig (Michael Joseph) £7,000 Simon Corrigan Tommy Was Here (Andre Deutsch) £5,000 Joanna Briscoe Mothers and Other Lovers (Phoenix) £2,000 Olivia Fane Landing on Clouds (Mandarin) £2,000
1992 Liane Jones The Dream Stone (Heinemann) £10,000 Peter M Rosenburg Kissing Through a Pane of Glass (Simon & Schuster) £5,000 Tibor Fischer Under the Frog (Polygon) £3,000 Eugene Mullan The Last of His Line (unpublished) £3,000 Edward St Aubyn Never Mind (Heinemann) £3,000
1991Amit Chaudhuri A Strange and Sublime Address (Heinemann) £10,000 Mark Swallow Teaching Little Fang (Macmillan) £7,000 Suzannah Dunn Quite Contrary (Sinclair Stevenson) £2,000 Lesley Glaister Honour Thy Father (Secker & Warburg) £2,000 Nino Ricci Lives of the Saints (W H Allen) £2,000 Simon Mason The Great English Nude (Constable) £2,000
1990 Robert McLiam Wilson Ripley Bogle (Andre Deutsch) £16,000 Elizabeth Chadwick The Wild Hunt (Michael Joseph) £3,000 Rosemary Cohen No Strange Land (unpublished) £3,000 Nicholas Shakespeare The Vision of Elena Silves (Collins Harvill) £3,000
1989 Nigel Watts The Life Game (Hodder & Stoughton) £10,000 William Riviere Watercolour Sky (Hodder & Stoughton) £5,000 Paul Houghton Harry’s Last Wedding (unpublished) £2,000 Alasdair McKee Uncle Henry’s Last Stand (Chatto & Windus) £2,000
1988 Alex Martin The General Interruptor MS (Viking/Penguin) £6,500 Candia McWilliam A Case of Knives (Bloomsbury) £6,500 Georgina Andrewes Behind the Waterfall (Pandora Press) £2,000 James Friel Left of North (Macmillan) £2,000 Glenn Patterson Burning Your Own (Chatto & Windus) £2,000 Susan Webster Small Tales of a Town (Simon & Schuster) £2,000
1987 James Maw Hard Luck (Quartet Books) £8,000 Peter Benson The Levels (proof, Constable) £4,500 Helen Flint Return Journey (proof, Heinemann) £4,500 Catherine Arnold Lost Time (Hodder & Stoughton) £1,000 H S Bhabra Gestures (Michael Joseph) £1,000 Lucy Pinney The Pink Stallion (proof, Hodder & Stoughton) £1,000
1986 Tim Parks Tongues of Flames (Heinemann) £9,000 Patricia Ferguson Family, Myths and Legends (Deutsch) £4,500 Philippa Blake Mzungu’s Wife (MS Bodley Head) £1,000 Matthew Kneale Whore Banquets accepted (MS Gollancz) £1,000 J F McLaughlin The Road to Dilmun (unpublished) £1,000 Kate Saunders The Prodigal Father (proof, Cape) £1,000
1985 Susan Kay Legacy (accepted MS Bodley Head) £12,500 Gary Armitage A Season of Peace (proof Secker & Warburg) £1,000 Elizabeth Ironside A Very Private Enterprise (Hodder & Stoughton) £1,000 Alice Mitchell Instead of Eden (MS W H Allen) £1,000 Caroline Stickland The Standing Hills (MS Gollancz) £1,000 George Schweiz The Earth Abides For Ever (unpublished) £1,000
1984 Ronald Frame Winter Journey (accepted by MS Bodley Head) £6,750 Clare Nonhebel Cold Showers (MS Century Hutchinson) £6,750 James Buchan A Parish of Rich Women (accepted MS Hamish Hamilton) £1,000 Helen Harris Playing Fields in Winter (MS Century Hutchinson) £1,000 Gareth Jones The Disinherited (Gollancz) £1,000 Simon Rees The Devil's Looking Glass (MS Methuen) £1,000
