The Nero Book Awards have unveiled their winners, with a diverse range of authors taking home prizes for their outstanding contributions to literature. Among the winners is Benjamin Wood, whose novel Seascraper has been hailed as an "utterly immersive read" by the judges. Set on a fictional stretch of the Merseyside coast, the novel follows Thomas, a shrimp fisher living with his mother, and explores what constitutes a well-lived life. Wood's attention to the prosaic details of everyday life has been praised, with one reviewer noting that "whether it’s harnessing a horse, cooking a fry-up or tuning a guitar, he transforms the quotidian into the poetic."
In the debut fiction category, Claire Lynch won for A Family Matter, a dual-timeline novel that explores the long-term effects of prejudice and secrecy on a family separated by homophobia in the 1980s. The judges described it as "a delicately written yet powerful story of injustice."
Sarah Perry's Death of an Ordinary Man took the nonfiction prize. The book is a personal account of the death of her father-in-law after a cancer diagnosis, and has been praised for its honesty, revealing nature, and generosity. In the children's fiction category, Jamila Gavin was awarded for My Soul, A Shining Tree, a novel based on the true story of Indian first world war gunner Khudadad Khan, told from four perspectives, including that of a walnut tree.
The winners will now compete for the Nero Gold prize, for the overall book of the year, set to be announced in March. Each of the four winning authors receives £5,000, with the overall prize carrying a further £30,000. The judges for the category prizes included Sinéad Gleeson, Paterson Joseph, and Sharna Jackson, among others.
The Nero Book Awards were launched in 2023 after Costa Coffee abruptly ended its book awards in June 2022. The prizes aim to point readers "of all ages and interests" towards the most outstanding books published in the UK and Ireland over the past year. The winners of the Nero Gold prize will be announced at a ceremony in March, with a final judging panel led by Nick Hornby, alongside broadcaster Reeta Chakrabarti and screenwriter and novelist Daisy Goodwin.
