For the fourth year in a row, I’ve been involved in judging the McKitterick Prize (for a first novel, published or unpublished, by a writer over 40). However, after three years of helping to assess the unpublished manuscripts, this was my first time as a judge for the published submissions. It has been a great experience! Today the shortlists for all of the 2025 Society of Authors Awards have been announced, so I can share our finalists below.

My three fellow judges and I were all asked for 50-word blurbs about each book and about the shortlist as a whole. I’m honoured that my overall blurb was chosen to accompany the McKitterick rundown in the press release:

Each of these six novels has a fully realized style. So confident and inviting are they that it’s hard to believe they are debuts. With nuanced characters and authentic settings and dilemmas, they engage the mind and delight the emotions. I will be following these authors’ careers with keen interest.

Notably, Tom Newlands’s Only Here, Only Now is a finalist for two of the prizes this year, the other being the ACDI Literary Prize, which is awarded to “a disabled or chronically ill writer, for an outstanding novel containing a disabled or chronically ill character or characters.” (A worthy successor to the Barbellion Prize, which, unfortunately, only ran for three years, 2020–22.) His teenage protagonist grows up in working-class Scotland in the 1990s with undiagnosed ADHD.

The winner and runner-up will be announced in advance of the SoA Awards ceremony in London on 18 June. In previous years, I have stayed home and watched the livestream, but this year I’ll attend in person and hope to meet Southwark Cathedral’s resident cat, Hodge!

Have you read anything from the McKitterick shortlist, or one of the other prize lists?