Meet Harriet Baker, The Sunday Times Charlotte Aitken Young Writer Of The Year

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She joins a sparkling alumni list boasting Zadie Smith, Robert Macfarlane, Simon Armitage, Naomi Alderman, Sally Rooney and more

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This evening (18 March), debut author Harriet Baker was revealed as the winner of the Sunday Times’ prestigious Charlotte Aitken Young Writer of the Year Award at a ceremony at London’s Whitechapel Gallery. Baker was awarded the £10,000 prize by The Times and Sunday Times’s chief literary critic Johanna Thomas-Corr and decorated author Sebastian Faulks, chair of the Charlotte Aitken Trust; they were joined on the judging panel by Claire Adam, Andrew Miller, Victoria Adukwei Bulley, Tomiwa Owolade and Justin Webb.

Meet Harriet Baker

Bristol-based Baker has written for London Review of Books, Paris Review, frieze and more. Her debut work, Rural Hours (2024), is a biography of Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Rosamond Lehmann. All three women moved to the countryside and were forever changed by it, finding invigoration after long periods of creative uncertainty. In these new landscapes, they found new paths: to convalescence and recovery; to sexual and political awakening; and, above all, to personal freedom and creative flourishing.

‘Harriet Baker’s Rural Hours has made me excited about literary criticism again,’ Thomas-Corr says. ‘She has succeeded stunningly in her task of showing how transformative country life can be for a writer’s imagination. Every page of this quietly confident debut is inspiring, crafted as it is with deep intelligence and maturity of thought.’

‘Rural Hours is that rare thing: a work of literary scholarship that is as readable as a novel,’ adds judge Owolade. ‘Harriet Baker elegantly and vividly evokes the pastoral lives and creative practices of Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Rosamond Lehmann.’

The Charlotte Aitken Young Writer of the Year Award is a prestigious, influential prize in UK and Irish literature. Awarded to promising writers under the age of 35, all forms are considered, whether fiction, non-fiction or poetry. Launched in 1991, previous winners and nominees include Simon Armitage (1993), Zadie Smith (2001), Robert Macfarlane (2004), Naomi Alderman (2007), Rory Stewart (nominated 2007), Max Porter (2016), Sally Rooney (2017) and Julia Armfield (nominated 2019). The 2023 winner was Tom Crewe for his debut novel The New Life.