Colin Barrett has won the Nero Book Awards debut fiction prize for his first novel, Wild Houses, about a small-town drugs feud, a kidnapping and a life-altering weekend in Co Mayo, where he grew up.
“Our winner Wild Houses was a clear standout for the sheer quality of its writing; a literary page-turner, with prose both lyrical and absorbing, brilliant dialogue and characters who seem to have walked off the street and on to the page,” the judges said. “The wit and humour in this novel belies an undercurrent of menace, and yet there is deep empathy and compassion at its heart.”
The Nero awards began last year, replacing the Costa awards, and are considered second only to the Booker Prize in critical and commercial significance.
[ Wild Houses by Colin Barrett: Superbly observed world framed by crime-caper plotOpens in new window ]
“Wining the Nero debut fiction is a very welcome surprise,” Barrett said. “I was always proud of Wild Houses when I finally finished it. Flaws and all, it was as good a novel as I could write at the time. But it felt like a book that might only be for me, not necessarily in terms of its subject matter, but it’s angles of approach, how it played out. And so I am left feeling very grateful and encouraged by its journey out into the world, and that readers have found merit in it, have found something in the stories of Dev, Nicky and Doll that resonated with them.”
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Kevin Power’s Irish Times review praised “a delicate and beautiful book about the lives of lonely people on the fringes of small-town gangsterdom ... for page after faultless page, Wild Houses is sheer joy to read. The characters live, Barrett’s fictional world and its textures absolutely persuade. He’s the real deal. But then, we knew that already.”
Barrett’s first short story collection Young Skins won the Guardian First Book Award, the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. Its longest story, Calm with Horses, was adapted into a feature film starring Barry Keoghan in 2020. His second collection, Homesickness, made the New York Times 100 Notable Books of the Year and was a Book of the Year in The Irish Times. His stories have been published in the Stinging Fly, Granta, Harper’s and The New Yorker. Wild Houses was also longlisted for the Booker Prize.
Each category winner receives £5,000 and is now in the running for the Nero Gold Prize, Book of the Year 2024, which will be announced on March 5th. A judging panel, chaired by celebrated journalist and author Bill Bryson, will select the overall winner, who will receive an additional £30,000 prize. Last year’s inaugural Nero Gold Prize winner was The Bee Sting by Irish author Paul Murray. Fellow Irish author Michael Magee won the debut prize for Close to Home.
Nero Book Awards: Other category winners
Fiction
Lost in The Garden
By Adam S Leslie
Dead Ink Books
Heather, Rachel and Antonia are going to Almanby. Heather needs to find her boyfriend who, like so many, went and never came back. Rachel has a mysterious package to deliver. And lovestruck Antonia just wants to spend the day with Heather. Creepy, dreamlike, unsettling and unforgettable, this is the story of why we don’t go to Almanby.
Adam S Leslie grew up in rural Lincolnshire in the 1980s, a child of Bagpuss, distant pylons and big red sunsets. He can now be found roaming the side-streets of Oxford or holed up in the big Blackwell’s bookshop daydreaming of stories and snacks. As well as an author, Leslie is also a screenwriter, musician and songwriter (under the name Berlin Horse), and produces and co-hosts RetroTube Archive Television Podcast.
The judges said: “A surprising folk horror about everyday encounters with the incredible. Vulnerable, rooted characters come of age in a hazy, hypnotic book that reflects contemporary Britain through a distorted lens.”
Non-fiction
Maurice and Maralyn: An Extraordinary True Story of Shipwreck, Survival and Love
By Sophie Elmhirst
Chatto & Windus
An extraordinary true story of shipwreck, survival and love. Bored with 1970s suburban life, Maurice and Maralyn plan their escape: sell the house, build a boat, set sail for New Zealand. Then, halfway around the world, their beloved boat is struck by a whale and the pair are cast adrift. Alone on a tiny raft, their love is put to the test.
Sophie Elmhirst is a prize-winning writer for the Guardian Long Read and The Economist’s 1843 magazine, and a contributing editor at the Gentlewoman and Harper’s Bazaar. In 2020 she won the British Press Award for Feature Writer of the Year; she has also won a Foreign Press Award and been longlisted for the Orwell Prize.
She first came across the story of Maurice and Maralyn Bailey researching a piece on our desire to escape. This is her first book. She lives in London.
The judges said: “A captivating gem of creative non-fiction writing that grips both as a human survival story, and as a profound, almost mythical tale of the wide blue yonder and the things that sustain us in times of crisis.”
Children’s fiction
The Twelve
By Liz Hyder, illustrated by Tom De Freston
Pushkin Children’s Books
From the author of Bearmouth, a captivating teen fantasy that explores the power of love and friendship in the face of ecological turmoil, set against the mystical backdrop of the Pembrokeshire coast.
Liz Hyder has been making up stories ever since she can remember. She has a BA in drama from the University of Bristol and, in early 2018, won the Bridge Award/MoniackMhor’s Emerging Writer Award. Her first novel, Bearmouth, won the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize for Older Readers, the Branford Boase Award, and was The Times’s Children’s Book of The Year.
Tom De Freston is an artist based in Oxford with his wife, Kiran Millwood Hargrave. His practice is dedicated to the construction of multimedia worlds, combining paintings, film and performance into immersive visceral narratives.
The judges said: “Beautiful characterisation, compelling storytelling, this is a book for now and all time – an immersive time-travel adventure that will keep readers hooked.”
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