# Betty Trask Prize and Awards

The Betty Trask Prize and Awards are for first novels written by authors under the age of 35 who reside in a current or former Commonwealth nation. Each year the awards total at least £20,000, with normally one author receiving a larger prize amount (£10,000 in very recent years), called the "Prize", and the remainder given to other writers, called the "Awards". These were established in 1984 by the Society of Authors at the bequest of the late Betty Trask, a reclusive author of over thirty romance novels. They're given to traditional or romantic novels, rather than those of an experimental style, and either published or unpublished works.

## List of award and prize winners
### 1980s

Betty Trask Prize and Award winners, 1984–1989 :
| Year | Author | Title | Prize |
| 1984 | Ronald Frame | Winter Journey | £6,750 |
| 1984 | Clare Nonhebel | Cold Showers | £6,750 |
| 1984 | James Buchan | A Parish of Rich Women | £1,000 |
| 1984 | Helen Harris | Playing Fields in Winter | £1,000 |
| 1984 | Gareth Jones | The Disinherited | £1,000 |
| 1984 | Simon Rees | The Devil's Looking Glass | £1,000 |
| 1985 | Susan Kay | Legacy | £12,500 |
| 1985 | Gary Armitage | A Season of Peace | £1,000 |
| 1985 | Elizabeth Ironside | A Very Private Enterprise | £1,000 |
| 1985 | Alice Mitchell | Instead of Eden | £1,000 |
| 1985 | George Schweiz | The Earth Abides For Ever | £1,000 |
| 1985 | Caroline Stickland | The Standing Hills | £1,000 |
| 1986 | Tim Parks | Tongues of Flame | £9,000 |
| 1986 | Patricia Ferguson | Family, Myths and Legends | £4,500 |
| 1986 | Philippa Blake | Mzungu's Wife | £1,000 |
| 1986 | Matthew Kneale | Whore Banquets | £1,000 |
| 1986 | J. F. McLaughlin | The Road to Dilmun | £1,000 |
| 1986 | Kate Saunders | The Prodigal Father | £1,000 |
| 1987 | James Maw | Hard Luck | £8,000 |
| 1987 | Peter Benson | The Levels | £4,500 |
| 1987 | Helen Flint | Return Journey | £4,500 |
| 1987 | Catherine Arnold | Lost Time | £1,000 |
| 1987 | H. S. Bhabra | Gestures | £1,000 |
| 1987 | Lucy Pinney | The Pink Stallion | £1,000 |
| 1988 | Alex Martin | The General Interruptor MS | £6,500 |
| 1988 | Candia McWilliam | A Case of Knives | £6,500 |
| 1988 | Georgina Andrewes | Behind the Waterfall | £2,000 |
| 1988 | James Friel | Left of North | £2,000 |
| 1988 | Glenn Patterson | Burning Your Own | £2,000 |
| 1988 | Susan Webster | Small Tales of a Town | £2,000 |
| 1989 | Nigel Watts | The Life Game | £10,000 |
| 1989 | William Riviere | Watercolour Sky | £5,000 |
| 1989 | Paul Houghton | Harry's Last Wedding | £2,000 |
| 1989 | Alasdair McKee | Uncle Henry's Last Stand | £2,000 |

### 1990s

Betty Trask Award winners, 1990–1999 :
| Year | Author | Title | Prize |
| 1990 | Robert McLiam Wilson | Ripley Bogle | £16,000 |
| 1990 | Elizabeth Chadwick | The Wild Hunt | £3,000 |
| 1990 | Rosemary Cohen | No Strange Land | £3,000 |
| 1990 | Nicholas Shakespeare | The Vision of Elena Silves | £3,000 |
| 1991 | Amit Chaudhuri | A Strange and Sublime Address | £10,000 |
| 1991 | Mark Swallow | Teaching Little Fang | £7,000 |
| 1991 | Suzannah Dunn | Quite Contrary | £2,000 |
| 1991 | Lesley Glaister | Honour Thy Father | £2,000 |
| 1991 | Simon Mason | The Great English Nude | £2,000 |
| 1991 | Nino Ricci | Lives of the Saints | £2,000 |
| 1992 | Peter M. Rosenburg | Kissing Through a Pane of Glass | £5,000 |
| 1992 | Tibor Fischer | Under the Frog | £3,000 |
| 1992 | Liane Jones | The Dream Stone | £3,000 |
| 1992 | Eugene Mullan | The Last of His Line | £3,000 |
| 1992 | Edward St Aubyn | Never Mind | £3,000 |
| 1993 | Mark Blackaby | You'll Never be Here Again | £10,000 |
| 1993 | Andrew Cowan | Pig | £7,000 |
| 1993 | Simon Corrigan | Tommy Was Here | £5,000 |
| 1993 | Joanna Briscoe | Mothers and Other Lovers | £2,000 |
| 1993 | Olivia Fane | Landing on Clouds | £2,000 |
| 1994 | Colin Bateman | Divorcing Jack | £12,000 |
| 1994 | Nadeem Aslam | Season of the Rainbirds | £10,000 |
| 1994 | Guy Burt | After the Hole | £1,000 |
| 1994 | Frances Liardet | The Game | £1,000 |
| 1994 | Jonathan Rix | Some Hope | £1,000 |
| 1995 | Robert Newman | Dependence Day | £10,000 |
| 1995 | Mark Behr | The Smell of Apples | £8,000 |
| 1995 | Martina Evans | Midnight Feast | £3,000 |
| 1995 | Rohit Manchanda | A Speck of Coaldust | £1,000 |
| 1995 | Juliet Thomas | Hallelujah Jordan | £1,000 |
| 1995 | Philippa Walshe | The Latecomer | £1,000 |
| 1995 | Madeleine Wickham | The Tennis Party | £1,000 |
| 1996 | John Lanchester | The Debt to Pleasure | £8,000 |
| 1996 | Meera Syal | Anita and Me | £7,000 |
| 1996 | Rhidian Brook | The Testimony of Taliesin Jones | £5,000 |
| 1996 | Louis Caron Buss | The Luxury of Exile | £5,000 |
| 1997 | Alex Garland | The Beach | £12,000 |
| 1997 | Josie Barnard | Poker Face | £5,000 |
| 1997 | Ardashir Vakil | Beach Boy | £5,000 |
| 1997 | Diran Adebayo | Some Kind of Black | £1,500 |
| 1997 | Sanjida O'Connell | Theory of Mind | £1,500 |
| 1998 | Kiran Desai | Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard | £10,000 |
| 1998 | Nick Earls | Zig Zag Street | £8,000 |
| 1998 | Phil Whitaker | Eclipse of the Sun | £5,000 |
| 1998 | Tobias Hill | Underground | £1,000 |
| 1998 | Gail Anderson-Dargatz | The Cure for Death by Lightning | £1,000 |
| 1999 | Elliot Perlman | Three Dollars | £7,000 |
| 1999 | Catherine Chidgey | In a Fishbone Church | £6,000 |
| 1999 | Giles Foden | The Last King of Scotland | £4,000 |
| 1999 | Dennis Bock | Olympia | £3,000 |
| 1999 | Rajeev Balasubramanyam | In Beautiful Disguises | £2,500 |
| 1999 | Sarah Waters | Tipping the Velvet | £1,000 |

### 2000s

Since 2009, the Betty Trask Prize has been given to a single author; the remaining receive the Betty Trask Award. A blue ribbon indicates the winner for that year.
Betty Trask Award winners, 2000–2009 :
| Year | Author | Title | Prize |
| 2000 | Jonathan Tulloch | The Season Ticket | £10,000 |
| 2000 | Julia Leigh | The Hunter | £7,000 |
| 2000 | Susan Elderkin | Sunset Over Chocolate Mountains | £4,000 |
| 2000 | Galaxy Craze | By the Shore | £2,000 |
| 2000 | Nicholas Griffin | The Requiem Shark | £2,000 |
| 2001 | Zadie Smith | White Teeth | £8,000 |
| 2001 | Justin Hill | The Drink and Dream Teahouse | £5,000 |
| 2001 | Maggie O'Farrell | After You'd Gone | £5,000 |
| 2001 | Vivien Kelly | Take One Young Man | £4,000 |
| 2001 | Mohsin Hamid | Moth Smoke | £2,500 |
| 2001 | Patrick Neate | Musungu Jim and the Great Chief Tuloko | £2,500 |
| 2002 | Hari Kunzru | The Impressionist | £8,000 |
| 2002 | Rachel Seiffert | The Dark Room | £5,000 |
| 2002 | Shamim Sarif | The World Unseen | £4,000 |
| 2002 | Helen Cross | My Summer of Love | £2,000 |
| 2002 | Chloe Hooper | A Child's Book of True Crime | £2,000 |
| 2002 | Susanna Jones | The Earthquake Bird | £2,000 |
| 2002 | Gwendoline Riley | Cold Water | £2,000 |
| 2003 | Jon McGregor | If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things | £10,000 |
| 2003 | Sarah Hall | Haweswater | £6,000 |
| 2003 | Stephanie Merritt | Gaveston | £4,000 |
| 2003 | Elizabeth Garner | Nightdancing | £2,000 |
| 2003 | Zoë Strachan | Negative Space | £2,000 |
| 2003 | Adam Thirlwell | Politics | £1,000 |
| 2004 | Louise Dean | Becoming Strangers | £8,000 |
| 2004 | Hannah MacDonald | The Sun Road | £6,000 |
| 2004 | Anthony Cartwright | The Afterglow | £3,000 |
| 2004 | Siddharth Dhanvant Sanghvi | The Last Song of Dusk | £3,000 |
| 2005 | Susan Fletcher | Eve Green | £16,000 |
| 2005 | Diana Evans | 26a | £2,000 |
| 2005 | Helen Walsh | Brass | £2,000 |
| 2006 | Nick Laird | Utterly Monkey | £10,000 |
| 2006 | Peter Hobbs | The Short Day Dying | £5,000 |
| 2006 | Nicola Monaghan | The Killing Jar | £5,000 |
| 2007 | Will Davis | My Side of the Story | £10,000 |
| 2007 | Adam Foulds | The Truth About These Strange Times | £2,500 |
| 2007 | Cynan Jones | The Long Dry | £2,500 |
| 2007 | Julie Maxwell | You Can Live Forever | £2,500 |
| 2007 | Karen Mcleod | In Search of the Missing Eyelash | £2,500 |
| 2008 | David Szalay | London and the South | £10,000 |
| 2008 | Ross Raisin | God's Own Country | £6,000 |
| 2008 | Thomas Leveritt | The Exchange Rate Between Love and Money | £2,000 |
| 2008 | Anna Ralph | The Floating Island | £2,000 |
| 2009 | Samantha Harvey | The Wilderness | £12,000 |
| 2009 | Eleanor Catton | The Rehearsal | £8,000 |

### 2010s

Betty Trask Award winners, 2010–2019 :
| Year | Author | Title | Prize |
| 2010 | Nadifa Mohamed | Black Mamba Boy | £10,000 |
| 2010 | Evie Wyld | After the Fire, A Still Small Voice | £7,000 |
| 2010 | Jenn Ashworth | A Kind of Intimacy | £1,500 |
| 2010 | Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani | I Do Not Come to You By Chance | £1,500 |
| 2011 | Anjali Joseph | Saraswati Park | £10,000 |
| 2011 | Laura Barton | Twenty-One Locks | £6,000 |
| 2011 | Simon Lelic | Rupture | £2,500 |
| 2011 | Robert Williams | Luke and Jon | £2,500 |
| 2012 | David Whitehouse | Bed | £8,000 |
| 2012 | Kalinda Ashton | The Danger Game | £3,000 |
| 2012 | Elizabeth Day | Scissors, Paper, Stone | £3,000 |
| 2012 | Annabel Pitcher | My Sister Lives on the Mantelpiece | £3,000 |
| 2012 | Emma Jane Unsworth | Hungry the Stars and Everything | £3,000 |
| 2013 | Grace McCleen | The Land of Decoration | £8,000 |
| 2013 | Chibundu Onuzo | The Spider King's Daughter | £7,000 |
| 2013 | Francesca Segal | The Innocents | £2,500 |
| 2013 | Will Wiles | Care of Wooden Floors | £2,500 |
| 2014 | Nathan Filer | The Shock of the Fall | £10,000 |
| 2014 | NoViolet Bulawayo | We Need New Names | £3,750 |
| 2014 | Sam Byers | Idiopathy | £3,750 |
| 2014 | Mave Fellowes | Chaplin and Company | £3,750 |
| 2014 | Matt Greene | Ostrich | £3,750 |
| 2015 | Ben Fergusson | The Spring of Kasper Meier | £10,000 |
| 2015 | Emma Healey | Elizabeth Is Missing | £5,000 |
| 2015 | Zoe Pilger | Eat My Heart Out | £5,000 |
| 2015 | Simon Wroe | Chop Chop | £5,000 |
| 2016 | Alex Christofi | Glass | £10,000 |
| 2016 | Irenosen Okojie | Butterfly Fish | £5,000 |
| 2016 | Natasha Pulley | The Watchmaker of Filigree Street | £5,000 |
| 2016 | Lucy Wood | Wood for Weathering | £5,000 |
| 2017 | Daniel Shand | Fallow | £10,000 |
| 2017 | Rowan Hisayo Buchanan | Harmless Like You | £3,000 |
| 2017 | Elnathan John | Born on a Tuesday | £3,000 |
| 2017 | Kathleen Jowitt | Speak Its Name | £3,000 |
| 2017 | Rob McCarthy | The Hollow Men | £3,000 |
| 2017 | Barney Norris | Five Rivers Met on a Wooded Plain | £3,000 |
| 2018 | Omar Robert Hamilton | The City Always Wins | £10,000 |
| 2018 | Sarah Day | Mussolini's Island | £3,250 |
| 2018 | Clare Fisher | All the Good Things | £3,250 |
| 2018 | Eli Goldstone | Strange Heart Beating | £3,250 |
| 2018 | Lloyd Markham | Bad Ideas/Chemicals | £3,250 |
| 2018 | Masande Ntshanga | The Reactive | £3,250 |
| 2019 | James Clarke | The Litten Path | £10,000 |
| 2019 | Samuel Fisher | The Chameleon | £2,700 |
| 2019 | Imogen Hermes Gowar | The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock | £2,700 |
| 2019 | Ruqaya Izzidien | The Watermelon Boys | £2,700 |
| 2019 | Daisy Lafarge | Paul | £2,700 |
| 2019 | Rebecca Ley | Sweet Fruit, Sour Land | £2,700 |
| 2019 | Sophie Mackintosh | The Water Cure | £2,700 |

### 2020s

Betty Trask Award winners, 2020–present :
| Year | Author | Title | Prize |
| 2020 | Kathryn Hind | Hitch | £10,000 |
| 2020 | Stacey Halls | The Familiars | £5,400 |
| 2020 | Isabella Hammad | The Parisian | £5,400 |
| 2020 | Okeychukwu Nzelu | The Private Joys of Nnenna Maloney | £5,400 |
| 2021 | Thomas McMullan | The Last Good Man | |
| 2021 | Graeme Armstrong | The Young Team | |
| 2021 | Maame Blue | Bad Love | |
| 2021 | Kiran Millwood Hargrave | The Mercies | |
| 2021 | Eley Williams | The Liar’s Dictionary | |
| 2021 | Nneoma Ike-Njoku | The Water House | |
| 2022 | Will McPhail | IN: The Graphic Novel | |
| 2022 | A. K. Blakemore | The Manningtree Witches | |
| 2022 | Natasha Brown | Assembly | |
| 2022 | Caleb Azumah Nelson | Open Water | |
| 2022 | Megan Nolan | Acts of Desperation | |
| 2023 | Daniel Wiles | Mercia's Take | £10,000 |
| 2023 | Paddy Crewe | My Name Is Yip | |
| 2023 | Imogen Crimp | A Very Nice Girl | |
| 2023 | Maddie Mortimer | Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies | |
| 2024 | Tom Crewe | The New Life | £10,000 |
| 2024 | Stephen Buoro | The Five Sorrowful Mysteries of Andy Africa | |
| 2024 | Rachel Connolly | Lazy City | |
| 2024 | Rachel Dawson | Neon Roses | |
| 2024 | C. E. McGill | Our Hideous Progeny | |
| 2024 | Nathan Munday | Whaling | |