2009 Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award

SO who will it be for the 2009 Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award? Will it be Henry Hitchings (The Secret Life of Words: How English Became English), Ross Raisin (God’s Own Country), Edward Hogan (Blackmoor) or Adam Foulds (The Broken Word)? Foulds, of course, won the very same award in 2008 for his first novel, The Truth About These Strange Times. He has a second novel coming out in May 2009, The Quickening Maze (Jonathan Cape).

Past winners include Naomi Alderman (Disobedience), Zadie Smith (White Teeth), Sarah Waters (Affinity), Robert Macfarlane (Mountains of the Mind), Paul Farley (The Boy from the Chemist is Here to See You), Patrick French (Liberty or Death), Francis Spufford (I May Be Some Time), Katherine Pierpoint (Truffle Beds), Andrew Cowan (Pig), William Dalrymple (City of Djinns), Simon Armitage (Xanadu, Kid), Caryl Phillips (Cambridge) and Helen Simpson (Four Bare Legs in a Bed).

The winner will be announced at the Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival on Sunday, April 5, 2009.