Posted on September 10, 2020 at 11:59 AM by Sadye Scott-Hainchek
They’re no four-year-old poets, but these young writers based in the United Kingdom are making quite the literary splashes.
Dara McAnulty has become the youngest ever writer to reach the Baillie Gifford Prize, reports the Guardian.
McAnulty began writing Diary of a Young Naturalist at age fourteen and was sixteen when his chance to win the UK’s top nonfiction prize was announced.
If he wins the £50,000 purse (about $64,000), he will also become the youngest author to ever receive a UK literary prize, too.
McAnulty’s book describes a year’s worth of encounters with nature as his family moved across Northern Ireland.
Learn more about him and the other (older) Baillie Gifford nominees in the Guardian.
Meanwhile, twenty-one-year-old Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé already has her financial reward in hand.
Àbíké-Íyímídé, a British university student, has signed a seven-figure US book deal with Macmillan for two novels. (She had previously found a publisher in the UK.)
One, the YA novel Ace of Spades, will be published in June; the other, we presume, is still in the works.
Àbíké-Íyímídé described her book to the Guardian as “Gossip Girl meets Get Out” — following, as it does, two Black private-school students trying to uncover the source of rumors about them.
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Categories: Today in Books