Ross RAISIN is the 2009 Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year

ROSS RAISIN has won The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award 2009 for his first novel, God’s Own Country (Viking, 2008).

Raisin, 30, a part-time waiter and former wine bar manager, was born in Yorkshire. He studied English at City University, London, and did an MA in creative writing at Goldsmiths University of London. It was towards the end of his time at Goldsmiths that he began on his first novel. God’s Own Country was published in 2008. The judges were especially impressed by Raisin’s strikingly individual voice.

Set on the North Yorkshire Moors, God’s Own Country is narrated by a gangling young misfit, Sam Marsdyke, who lives on an isolated hill farm. Bristling with dialect and pungent regional idioms, the mocking commentary he trains on the incomers and ecominded types colonising the countryside around his family’s home proves both brilliantly funny and balefully indicative of his increasingly disturbed state.

Ross is now working on his second book, a novel set in Glasgow about an ex-shipyard worker and what happens to him after the death of his wife.

God’s Own Country is published as Out Backward (Harper Perennial, 2008) in the United States.