Moses McKenzie is on The Sunday Times Charlotte Aitken Young Writer of the Year Award shortlist announced on Sunday, February 16, 2025.
The Sunday Times Charlotte Aitken Trust Young Writer of the Year award is a literary prize awarded to a British author under 35 for a published work of fiction, non-fiction, or poetry. Some of the previous winners of the prize founded in 1991 and administered by the Society of Authors have been Zadie Smith, Adam Foulds, and Raymond Antrobus. Momtaza Mehri was on the shortlist for 2024.
The 2025 jury chaired by Johanna Thomas-Corr alongside Desmond Elliot Prize alumna Claire Adam, Booker Prize shortlisted author Andrew Miller, celebrated poet Victoria Adukwei Bulley as well as journalist and author Tomiwa Owolade, and seasoned BBC broadcaster Justin Webb announced the shortlist of four on Sunday.
Johanna Thomas-Corr said: ‘Here are four unforgettable new voices in fiction and non-fiction who possess thrilling potential. They are all offering us new angles on the world and doing it with such intelligence and conviction.’
The shortlist includes Moses McKenzie for his sophomore novel Fast by the Horns, a sharp and lyrical exploration of Black immigrant life and the Rastafari community in 1980s England. The Caribbean-descent Brit grew up in Bristol, where his first two novels are set. His debut novel, An Olive Grove in Ends won the Hawthornden Prize for Literature in 2023, was listed as a Guardian Novel of the Year in 2022, and was shortlisted for the Writers’ Guild Best First Novel Award 2023. Moses was named one of The Observer’s 10 Must-Read Debut Novelists of 2022 and won the inaugural Soho House Breakthrough Writer Award the same year. His second novel, Fast by the Horns published in May 2024 comes with the following blurb;
From the Hawthornden Prize-winning author of An Olive Grove in Ends, a powerful story of broken dreams and divided loyalties
Bristol, 1980. In the tight-knit neighbourhood of St. Pauls, 14-year-old Jabari is proud of his position as the only son of revered community leader Ras Levi. Raised in a world of sus laws and council neglect, Jabari finds hope in his Rastafari faith, which offers the comforting vision that one day he and his fellow believers will repatriate to the motherland, where they will at last be free from oppression and prejudice.
But in St Pauls a local firebrand activist has been arrested, and violence soon overflows, pulling both father and son into its maelstrom. As Jabari rages against the iniquity, a chance encounter with a young Black child gifts him an opportunity for justice – or is it revenge?
The £ 10,000 winner will be announced on Tuesday, March 18, in London, UK. Each shortlistee will receive £1000.
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