Hawthornden Prize

Wildfire (UK Edition)

Little, Brown and Company (US Edition)

The 2023 Hawthornden Prize for Literature

has been awarded to

Moses McKenzie

for

AN OLIVE GROVE IN ENDS

“An Olive Grove in Ends is a dazzling debut, richly textured, gritty and profound. Moses McKenzie offers a thrillingly distinctive new voice, both street-wise and literary; lilting Jamaican patois mixed with Bristol slang is shot through with the language of the Bible and of the Koran. Set in the world of the disenfranchised and of drug-dealers, the novel is a moving tale of earthly love and spiritual redemption.” 

CAROLINE MOORE

Sayon Hughes longs to escape the volatile Bris­tol neighborhood known as Ends, the tight-knit but sometimes lawless world in which he was raised, and forge a better life with Shona, the girl he’s loved since grade school. With few paths out, he is drawn into dealing drugs along­side his cousin, the unpredictable but fiercely loyal Cuba. Sayon is on the cusp of making a clean break when an altercation with a rival dealer turns deadly and an expected witness threatens blackmail, upending his plans. Sayon’s loyalties are torn. If Shona learns the secret of his crime, he will lose her forever. But if he doesn’t escape Ends now, he may never get another chance. Is it possible to break free of the bookies’ tickets, burnt spoons, and crook­ed solutions, and still keep the love of his life? Rippling with authenticity and power, Mo­ses McKenzie’s dazzling debut brings to life a vi­brant and teeming world we have read too little about. In its sheer lyrical power, An Olive Grove in Ends recalls the work of James Baldwin and marks the arrival of an exciting and formidable new voice.

Previous winners of the Hawthornden Prize

1919 - Edward Shanks
1920 - John Freeman
1921 - Romer Wilson
1922 - Edmund Blunden
1923 - David Garnett
1924 - Ralph Hale Mottram
1925 - Seán O'Casey
1926 - Vita Sackville-West
1927 - Henry Williamson
1928 - Siegfried Sassoon
1929 - Lord David Cecil
1930 - Geoffrey Dennis
1931 - Kate O'Brien
1932 - Charles Morgan
1933 - Vita Sackville-West
1934 - James Hilton
1935 - Robert Graves
1936 - Evelyn Waugh
1937 - Ruth Pitter
1938 - David Jones
1939 - Christopher Hassall
1940 - James Pope-Hennessy
1941 - Graham Greene
1942 - John Llewelyn Rhys
1943 - Sidney Keyes
1944 - Martyn Skinner
1958 - Dom Moraes
1960 - Alan Sillitoe
1961 - Ted Hughes
1962 - Robert Shaw
1963 - Alistair Horne
1964 - V. S. Naipaul
1965 - William Trevor
1967 - Michael Frayn
1968 - Michael Levey
1969 - Geoffrey Hill
1970 - Piers Paul Read
1974 - Oliver Sacks
1975 - David Lodge
1976 - Robert Nye
1977 - Bruce Chatwin
1978 - David Cook
1979 - P. S. Rushforth
1980 - Christopher Reid
1981 - Douglas Dunn
1982 - Timothy Mo
1983 - Jonathan Keates
1988 - Colin Thubron
1989 - Alan Bennett
1990 - Kit Wright
1991 - Claire Tomalin
1992 - Ferdinand Mount
1993 - Andrew Barrow
1994 - Tim Pears
1995 - James Michie
1996 - Hilary Mantel
1997 - John Lanchester
1998 - Charles Nicholl
1999 - Antony Beevor
2000 - Michael Longley
2001 - Helen Simpson
2002 - Eamon Duffy
2003 - William Fiennes
2004 - Jonathan Bate
2005 - Justin Cartwright
2006 - Alexander Masters
2007 - M. J. Hyland
2008 - Nicola Barker
2009 - Patrick French
2010 - Alice Oswald
2011 - Candia McWilliam
2012 - Ali Smith
2013 - Jamie McKendrick
2014 - Emily Berry
2015 - Colm Tóibín
2016 - Tessa Hadley
2017 - Graham Swift
2018 - Jenny Uglow
2019 - Sue Prideaux
2020 - John McCullough
2022 - Ian Duhig
2023 - Moses McKenzie

The Hawthornden Prize, one of Britain’s oldest literary awards, was established in 1919 by Alice Warrender. This £15,000 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. Unlike other major literary awards, the Hawthornden Prize does not solicit submissions.