Longlist announced for Gordon Burn Prize 2025
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The twelve books longlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize 2025 are revealed today (Monday 9 December 2024).
The £10,000 Gordon Burn Prize celebrates writing across all genres including biography, memoir, novels, and short story collections. It recognises exceptional writing which has an unconventional perspective, style or subject matter and often defies easy categorisation. It celebrates literary outliers and daring and experimental work that often speaks to broader societal issues.
The longlist for the 2025 Gordon Burn Prize is:
- Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel (Daunt Originals)
- Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other by Danielle Dutton (Prototype)
- The Strangers: Five Extraordinary Black Men and the Worlds That Made Them by Ekow Eshun (Hamish Hamilton)
- Ootlin by Jenni Fagan (Hutchinson Heinemann)
- Mrs Jekyll by Emma Glass (CHEERIO)
- I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning by Keiran Goddard (Abacus)
- White Terror: A True Story of Murder, Bombings and Germany’s Far Right by Jacob Kushner (Mudlark)
- Poor Artists by Gabrielle de la Puente and Zanina Muhammed (The White Pube) (Particular Books)
- Only Here, Only Now by Tom Newlands (Phoenix)
- The Lasting Harm: Witnessing the Trail of Ghislaine Maxwell by Lucia Osborne-Crowley (4th Estate)
- England is Mine by Nicolas Padamsee (Serpent’s Tail)
- The Horse by Willy Vlautin (Faber & Faber)
The prize was founded in 2012 by New Writing North, Faber & Faber, and the Gordon Burn Trust. It is open to all writers of any nationality for work written in English and published in the UK the previous year. It is supported by Newcastle University and the Newcastle Centre for the Literary Arts (NCLA).
The ambition of the prize is to celebrate work that shows an affinity with the unique writing talent of Gordon Burn. Burn was a Newcastle-born journalist and author whose interests were wide-ranging and who often melded fact and fiction to create alternate perspectives on pressing concerns of the time.
Recent winners include Kathryn Scanlan in 2024 for her novel Kick the Latch, a bravura investigation of authenticity and form centred on the world of horse training, based on transcribed interviews with a real-life trainer: Preti Taneja’s Aftermath (2022 winner), an experimental book that strives to make sense of the 2019 London Bridge terror attack: and Peter Pomerantsev’s This is Not Propaganda (2020 winner), a study on the war against reality.
The longlist was selected by the Gordon Burn Prize 2025 judges:
- Terri White (chair), journalist, screenwriter and author of the memoir Coming Undone.
- Carl Anka, journalist, author, and broadcaster who specialises in pop culture, video games, films, and football.
- Angela Hui, journalist, editor and author of Takeaway: A Childhood from Behind the Counter.
- Sarah Phelps, writer for stage, radio and TV. Her credits include EastEnders, Being Human and the BAFTA-award-winning The Sixth Commandment.
- David Whitehouse, novelist, non-fiction writer and writer for film and television, whose books include About A Son, shortlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize in 2022.
The judges will select the shortlist, which will be announced in January 2025, and the winner, which will be announced on 6 March 2025. The winning writer will receive £10,000 and the chance to undertake a writing retreat at Gordon Burn’s cottage in Berwickshire.