Fagan wins 2025 Gordon Burn Prize

In the UK, Jenni Fagan has won the 2025 Gordon Burn Prize, worth £10,000 (A$20,566), for Ootlin (Hutchinson Heinemann).

Selected from a shortlist of five that included Lucia Osborne-Crowley’s The Lasting Harm: Witnessing the Trial of Ghislaine Maxwell (A&U), Ootlin is described as ‘a journey through the broken UK care system’ by BookBrunch.

Judge David Whitehouse said: ‘All of the books on the shortlist deserve recognition, but Jenni Fagan’s Ootlin is a singular achievement. Everything about it – the language, the rhythm, the approach, the subject, the author – conspires to make a beautiful, vital, difficult, human piece of art.’

New Writing North CEO Claire Malcolm said: ‘Jenni’s book has haunted me since I read it, and it proudly moved me as both a work of art and a visceral contribution to an urgent and necessary debate about our care system and whether it is fit for purpose. Books like this are incredibly hard to write, they can be hard to read, but they give such a great deal in helping us to understand fellow human experience.’

Fagan was born in Scotland, and was selected as one of Granta’s Best Young British Novelists after the publication of her debut novel, The Panopticon (Cornerstone). Her second novel, The Sunlight Pilgrims (Cornerstone), saw her win the Scottish Author of the Year at the Herald Culture Awards. Her third novel, Luckenbooth (Windmill Books), was shortlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize in 2021.

Founded in 2012 by New Writing North, Faber & Faber, and the Gordon Burn Trust, the Gordon Burn Prize recognises ‘exceptional writing which has an unconventional perspective, style or subject matter and often defies easy categorisation’.

The previous winner of the prize was Kathryn Scanlan for Kick the Latch (Daunt Books).

Category: International news