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Oxblood: Winner of the Sunday Times Charlotte Aitken Young Writer of the Year Award

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Thomas-Corr said: “Tom Benn is one of publishing’s best kept secrets. His story about the struggles of three generations of women in a Manchester crime clan has been rendered with care and specificity. The result is an atmospheric family saga that contains so much buried love, anger, grief, sexual jealousy and bitter disappointment.”

Sponsored by the Charlotte Aitken Trust, who enter their second year as sponsors of the prize, the award is given annually to the best work of fiction, non-fiction or poetry by a British or Irish author of 35 or under. The British Council will be advocating the shortlisted authors to international audiences and helping them to forge new literary connections oversees. Oxblood, Benn’s fourth novel, was also longlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize 2022. His first novel, The Doll Princess (Jonathan Cape), was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize and the Portico Prize and longlisted for the CWA’s John Creasey Dagger. Oxblood is a propulsive, bountiful, fearless work of literary art. The female characters at the heart of Benn’s tale are single-minded, dogged and so completely convinced of themselves and their actions, that the reader is persuaded to be stirred by them and to remember them. It is clear that this is only the beginning for Tom Benn. His work is a vehicle for that rare unflinching look at our rawness, our brutality and our vulnerability.‘ Matriarch Nedra presides over the household, which bustles with activity as she prepares the welcome feast for her grandson Kelly’s return from prison.

About the contributors

Admire the art over the artist, the work over the worker. People transgress and disappoint but art can transgress to transcend. Which public event affected you most?

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.”The gangland novel you have never read before, the one that gets inside the minds of three generations of women whose lives are bound to the crime lords of Wythenshawe by blood, flesh, fear, desire and a hunger for possession that cannot be contained in one lifetime. In a place where Mean Streets meets Most Haunted, with his hyper-intense, hallucinogenic prose, Benn will make you believe in ghosts' -- CATHI UNSWORTH My one slight criticism is that the setup (whilst important to give context to the characters) phase of the book laboured the point a little. Without giving anything away, I'll just say I pushed myself through the first half of the book a little bit, but read the second half more or less in one sitting. You’ve written a short horror film, Real Gods Require Blood, and are associated with northern noir. Do these genres help define you as a writer? 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? Mona Arshi said: ‘ It was joyful to encounter each of these books and be introduced to four new exceptional voices entering the literary landscape. All four books this year are doing something new and exciting in the genres they travel in, they are such different books and what ultimately stood out for me was their attention to language as well as the originality of the ideas and forms they so meticulously explored.‘

If I read a better novel than Oxblood in 2022, it'll be a blinding year for fiction. Tom Benn, please take a bow. Everybody else, please take note' -- JOSEPH KNOX More than anything, I was enamoured with Benn's audacity: to tell this raw, violent, compassionate story; to use language in such a thrilling and fresh way; to explore the dark hearts of ordinary people, and to not look away when things get messy; to be, basically, this good' -- D W WILSON Oxblood shows us that there are few places literature can't take us, if the writer is brave enough, and gifted enough' -- FRANCIS SPUFFORD Oxblood shows us that there are few places literature can't take us, if the writer is brave enough, and gifted enough' FRANCIS SPUFFORD To witness the mid-meal apocalypse: James Ellroy, Ishmael Reed, Zora Neale Hurston, Blaise Cendrars, Begum Rokeya, Marco Vassi, Alan Moore and Anna Kavan. The best and worst things about where you live?

Reviews

It’s about three generations of mothers in a crime family, living together in 1980s Wythenshawe, Manchester. The patriarchs are dead but their violent legacy traps these women together and also keeps them apart. I wanted to give expression to a place and an era, its moral canvas, and female perspectives. This meant I had to really take my time. It was rejected by two dozen publishers. What was their problem? And then there is Jan – the teenage tearaway running as fast as she can from her mother, her grandmother, and her own unnamed baby. From a standout scholar, a biography of John Donne: the poet of love, sex, and death. In Super-Infinite, Katherine Rundell embarks on a fleet-footed ‘act of evangelism’, showing us the many sides of Donne’s extraordinary life, his obsessions, his blazing words, and his tempestuous Elizabethan times – unveiling Donne as the most remarkable mind and as a lesson in living.

Glad our Kelly is still doing everso well. Hope he keeps the job. Has he got himself a nice girl yet? Went to an American wedding with our Freddy last week! A feller from his works. Bride was a real Yank. We stayed on Delaware River, Trenton, New Jersey. Lovely ceremony. Freddy said she was up the junction but you couldnt tell. Lovely slim figure. Never touched her own cake! Our Freddy had plenty. Just as well. No currants in American cakes. I miss currants. Sorry we cant visit this year. I know its been forever. How is our Jan doing at school? Any boyfriend trouble? All that still to come I suspect. Hows weather? For us Saturday Fine and Dry. Sunday Wet and Windy. And then there is Jan – the teenage tearaway running as fast as she can from her mother, her grandmother and her own unnamed baby. 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.It was a close call, because we were having to decide between four wonderful and wildly different books – but in the end, to me, it was Tom Benn who was doing the boldest and richest thing, using an unflinching sympathy and a fascinatingly mutated version of the crime writer’s tool-kit to carry the reader into the intimate depths of a household of violence. It’s a disconcerting book, with its insistence that a family’s heart of darkness is still despite it all a heart, and I wouldn’t call it reassuring, yet it shows us that there are few places literature can’t take us, if the writer is brave enough, and gifted enough.‘ He’s young and daft but he’s out now and now he’s out he might decide he’d rather stay out, for his nana’s cooking.’ Tom Benn’s first novel, The Doll Princess, was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize and the Portico Prize, and longlisted for the CWA’s John Creasey Dagger. Benn’s creative nonfiction has appeared in the Paris Review and he won the BFI’s iWrite scheme for emerging screenwriters.

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