To me, genres are ever-evolving narrative frameworks that expose our fears and fantasies, offering writers trenchant tools to interrogate, repurpose and vandalise. We might turn to genre for comfort: to escape the tedium, uncertainty and injustice of reality; but genre can also confront these horrors, directly or askance, and say something troubling and truthful about them. What projects are you working on? The Dodds family once ruled Manchester’s underworld; now the men are dead, leaving three generations of women trapped in a house haunted by violence, harbouring an unregistered baby. Stig Abell said: “One good thing about judging a prize like this is that you approach a book without context or preconception and get to just plunge in. And Oxblood is a book to get lost headlong in. Tom Benn manages to be heart-felt and attentive and generous, without ever resorting to being sentimental. In fact this is a book of anti-sentimental greatness, wonderfully written, deft and pungent and sensuous. It is brave too, telling a tale without fear of ugliness, without seeking to smooth over the bumps of lived life at all. It is honest and truthful, but also a great feat of fiction. And he writes amazing female characters as well. It felt right to give him the prize not just as a reward for this massive achievement, but as a nod towards the novels he’s going to write in the future, which we have a feeling will be great.” And then there is Jan – the teenage tearaway running as fast as she can from her mother, her grandmother and her own unnamed baby. What a voice Tom Benn has got, what a feel for character and place, and what an uncompromising approach he has to his subject and material. He’s gritty but totally empathetic, and inhabits his milieu of 1980s Manchester with total conviction and no attempt to soften the voices of his characters We were bowled over as a judging panel by Oxblood, and feel confident too that Tom is a talent who will grow and grow.‘

Matriarch Nedra presides over the household, which bustles with activity as she prepares the welcome feast for her grandson Kelly’s return from prison.

Set in a council house haunted by memories of dead family members, Benn’s unflinching storytelling unearths the forgotten working class voices left in the footnotes of Manchester’s industrial history, shrouded by criminal secrecy and steeped in a powerful emotional darkness which left this year’s judges’ ‘bowled over’ and certain that Tom Benn’s talent will only continue to ‘grow and grow’. Congratulations, Tom, on winning the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. What does it mean to you? Set in a council house haunted by memories of dead family members, Benn’s unflinching storytelling unearths the forgotten working class voices left in the footnotes of Manchester’s industrial history, shrouded by criminal secrecy and steeped in a powerful emotional darkness which left this year’s judges ‘bowled over’ and certain that Tom Benn’s talent will only continue to ‘grow and grow’. Francis Spufford said: ‘ I’m delighted by the haul of treasures our shortlist represents. We’ve got non- fiction whose every sentence glitters with intelligence; life-writing that makes radical and heartfelt use of form; a crime novel that claims the richest and darkest of emotional territory; and a piece of literary innovation which plays its way to the limits of life and death. And just behind them, there was a mass of other lovely stuff we were sorry to have to leave out. On this showing, the future of writing is very strong – and incredibly various.‘

Mona Arshi said: “ Oxblood is one of those rare books where place and time are conjured so effortlessly, the caste of characters are drawn with so much ease and grace … Tom Benn is a seriously gifted writer and I’m keen to read whatever he does next.” Johanna Thomas-Corrsaid: ‘You can’t help but admire four young writers who have taken huge risks with style, subject and form and who have set themselves free of publishing conventions. All of them have taken on unpromising subjects and produced works of great beauty and generosity that refuse to be bent into shape. These are books that you can read again and again – and still feel rewarded.‘Every now and then I might hear him discussing his shift with my mother, always when they thought I was out of earshot. Tales of drunkenness, beatings, petty crime.

Prose like poetry...I really felt like I needed to savour each sentence. An utterly unique voice, telling a working-class story that resists the usual clichés' -- OTEGHA UWAGBAI was drawn to this novel simply by the fact that it is set in the Wythenshawe and Manchester of the 60's, 70's and 80's that I grew up in and where my paternal grandparents lived. There's a fascination in reading fiction that references places that we know. Novelist and screenwriter Tom Benn, has been named winner of the 2022 Sunday Times Charlotte Aitken Young Writer of the Year Award for Oxblood, a novel that judge Oyinkan Braithwaite called a ‘bountiful, fearless work of literary art’, daringly exploring masculine violence and fractured female agency through the domestic lives of three generations of working-class women in 1980s Manchester. A blistering portrait of a family on fire, Oxblood lays bare the horror of violence, the exile of grief, and the extraordinary power of love. I recognised a lot of this description of the ‘80s while, at the same time, the life described in it is very different from what my own was at the time. This is the tale of three women of different generations in the same family, the youngest being roughly contemporaneous with me. Teenage girls, even more than now, were seen as appropriate sex objects then. You either had to veer away from it (as I did, hiding myself in oversized men’s suits and scary goth makeup) or lean into it, as love-starved Jan does here. Oxblood shows us that there are few places literature can't take us, if the writer is brave enough, and gifted enough' FRANCIS SPUFFORD