Hawthornden Prize
Mr Outside
Available through Prototype Publishing.
The 2026 Hawthornden Prize for Literature
has been awarded to
Caleb Klaces
for
Mr Outside
“A story about a man preparing his reclusive father to move into a care home doesn’t seem likely to be a page turner, but I read Mr Outside straight through as though holding my breath. In the book’s brief timeframe (just a couple of days), nothing happens, and yet everything happens; short bursts of prose seem to carry the reader in a capsule of real time, but every moment is freighted with the past. Tender but unsentimental, this is a book about absence and intimacy, gratitude and regret, which asks how we hold our love for one another across incalculable distances, how we forgive, and how we say goodbye: a meditation on the heartbreaking unfinishedness of things.”
—EMILY BERRY
During a time of restricted movement, the narrator of Mr Outside visits his reclusive father Thomas who is packing up to move into a care home. As father and son grapple with the task, long-buried conflicts resurface. Thomas, a poet and former radical priest, slips between affection and fear, while the narrator struggles to find the words he’s been holding back. Yet amidst confusion and grief, moments of humour and connection emerge, as both men discover new ways to listen.
Told through a striking combination of text and image, Klaces’ distilled novel explores the stories we tell about our lives, intimacy in crisis, and the fragile line between reality and delusion. Based on the life of his own father, Mr Outside is poignant, profound, and unexpectedly funny; a tender meditation on endings, the limits of understanding, and the act of letting go.
Caleb Klaces is the author of the novel Fatherhood, which won a Northern Writers Award and was longlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize, and the poetry collections Away From Me and Bottled Air, which won an Eric Gregory Award and the Melita Hume Prize. His second novel, Mr Outside, was shortlisted for the Encore Award 2026. He grew up in Birmingham.
With Honorable Mentions
to
Colwill Brown for We Pretty Pieces of Flesh
&
Thomas A Clark for thrums
thrums
Available through Carcanet.
‘to be affected in many ways
is the sole ambition of the days’
thrums grows out of Clark’s celebrated collection, that which appears, in an extension and affirmation of that book’s particular aesthetic. Including poems first published in London Review of Books and New York Review of Books, the poems’ closely observed landscapes tell of presence and loss, of change and precarious continuity.
One of Scotland’s most distinctive writers, a vivid minimalist, ruralist and experimentalist, his selected poems, The Threadbare Coat (2020), is also published by Carcanet.
Thomas A Clark lives in a fishing village on the east coast of Scotland. Five books of his poetry have been published by Carcanet, including The Hundred Thousand Places (2009), Yellow & Blue (2014), Farm by the Shore (2017), The Threadbare Coat (2020) and that which appears (2024). Numerous small books, cards and editions from his own Moschatel Press investigate ways that the presentation of poetry can inform sense and nuance. During the summer months, with the artist Laurie Clark, he runs Cairn Gallery, a space for minimal and conceptual art.
We Pretty Pieces of Flesh
Available through Chatto & Windus.
‘Ask anyone non-Northern, they’ll only know Donny as punch line of a joke or place they changed trains once ont way to London.’
But Doncaster’s also the home of Rach, Shaz and Kel, bezzies since childhood and Donny lasses through and through. They share everything, from blagging their way into nightclubs to trips to the Family Planning clinic when they are late. Never mind that Rach is skeptical of Shaz’s bolder plots; or that Shaz, who comes from a rougher end of town, feels left behind when the others begin charting a course to uni; or that Kel sometimes feels split in two trying to keep the peace — their friendship is as indestructible as they are. But as they grow up and away from one another, a long-festering secret threatens to rip the trio apart.
We Pretty Pieces of Flesh takes you by the hand and leads you through Doncaster’s schoolyards, alleyways and nightclubs, laying bare the intimate treacheries of adolescence and the ways we betray ourselves when we don’t trust our friends. Like The Glorious Heresies and Shuggie Bain, it tracks hard-edged lives and makes them sing, turning one overlooked place into the very centre of the world.
Colwill Brown is the winner of the 2025 BBC National Short Story Award and author of the novel We Pretty Pieces of Flesh, which was named a Best Book of 2025 by The Guardian, The Irish Times, The Irish Independent, and The London Magazine, shortlisted for The Goldsmiths Prize, the Dylan Thomas Prize, and the Center for Fiction First Novel Award, and longlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize and the PEN/Hemingway Award.
Previous winners of the Hawthornden Prize
2025 - Manya Wilkinson
2024 - Samantha Harvey
2023 - Moses McKenzie
2022 - Ian Duhig
2021 - Naoise Dolan
2020 - John McCullough
2019 - Sue Prideaux
2018 - Jenny Uglow
2017 - Graham Swift
2016 - Tessa Hadley
2015 - Colm Tóibín
2014 - Emily Berry
2013 - Jamie McKendrick
2012 - Ali Smith
2011 - Candia McWilliam
2010 - Alice Oswald
2009 - Patrick French
2008 - Nicola Barker
2007 - M. J. Hyland
2006 - Alexander Masters
2005 - Justin Cartwright
2004 - Jonathan Bate
2003 - William Fiennes
2002 - Eamon Duffy
2001 - Helen Simpson
2000 - Michael Longley
1999 - Antony Beevor
1998 - Charles Nicholl
1997 - John Lanchester
1996 - Hilary Mantel
1995 - James Michie
1994 - Tim Pears
1993 - Andrew Barrow
1992 - Ferdinand Mount
1991 - Claire Tomalin
1990 - Kit Wright
1989 - Alan Bennett
1988 - Colin Thubron
1983 - Jonathan Keates
1982 - Timothy Mo
1981 - Douglas Dunn
1980 - Christopher Reid
1979 - P. S. Rushforth
1978 - David Cook
1977 - Bruce Chatwin
1976 - Robert Nye
1975 - David Lodge
1974 - Oliver Sacks
1970 - Piers Paul Read
1969 - Geoffrey Hill
1968 - Michael Levey
1967 - Michael Frayn
1965 - William Trevor
1964 - V. S. Naipaul
1963 - Alistair Horne
1962 - Robert Shaw
1961 - Ted Hughes
1960 - Alan Sillitoe
1958 - Dom Moraes
1944 - Martyn Skinner
1943 - Sidney Keyes
1942 - John Llewelyn Rhys
1941 - Graham Greene
1940 - James Pope-Hennessy
1939 - Christopher Hassall
1938 - David Jones
1937 - Ruth Pitter
1936 - Evelyn Waugh
1935 - Robert Graves
1934 - James Hilton
1933 - Vita Sackville-West
1932 - Charles Morgan
1931 - Kate O'Brien
1930 - Geoffrey Dennis
1929 - Lord David Cecil
1928 - Siegfried Sassoon
1927 - Henry Williamson
1926 - Vita Sackville-West
1925 - Seán O'Casey
1924 - Ralph Hale Mottram
1923 - David Garnett
1922 - Edmund Blunden
1921 - Romer Wilson
1920 - John Freeman
1919 - Edward Shanks
The Hawthornden Prize, one of Britain’s oldest literary awards, was established in 1919 by Alice Warrender. This £25,000 prize is awarded annually to a British, Irish or British-based author for a work of “imaginative literature” – including poetry, novels, history, biography and creative non-fiction – published in the previous calendar year. The prize is for a book in English, not for a translation. Previous winners of the prize are excluded from the shortlist.