29/11/2024
Jen Stout and Ajay Close receive their Awards from The Hebridean Baker Coinneach MacLeod at last night’s Saltires Book of the Year Awards in Edinburgh
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The First Book of the Year, sponsored by Creative Scotland, identifies rising stars as their talent continues to develop and was this year awarded to Night Train to Odesa by journalist Jen Stout, which was praised by the judges as an “accomplished and beautiful work, blending journalism, memoir, history, art” as it conveys the very human horrors of Russian aggression in Ukraine in a profound debut which moves seamlessly between the epic and the intimate.
The Fiction Book of the Year, What Doesn’t Kill Us by Ajay Close is a police-procedural-meets-feminist-reimagining set around Leeds and Bradford in the late 1970s and early 80s, based on the case of the Yorkshire Ripper Peter Sutcliffe who terrorised Ajay Close’s native Yorkshire at that time. The judges called the novel, “Superb, evocative and enraging, with brilliant characterisation, humour, and a huge sense of tension from the ever-present threat of violence.”
