The Betty Trask Prize and Awards are for first novels written by authors under the age of 35 who reside in a current or former Commonwealth nation. Each year the awards total at least £20,000, with normally one author receiving a larger prize amount (£10,000 in very recent years), called the "Prize", and the remainder given to the other nominees, called the "Awards". These were established in 1984 by the Society of Authors at the bequest of the late Betty Trask, a reclusive author of over thirty romance novels. They're given to traditional or romantic novels, rather than those of an experimental style, and either published or unpublished works.
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👉 Betty Trask Award in the context of Maggie O'Farrell
Maggie O'Farrell FRSL (born 1972) is a novelist from Northern Ireland. Her acclaimed first novel, After You'd Gone, won the Betty Trask Award and a later one, The Hand That First Held Mine, the 2010 Costa Novel Award. She has twice been shortlisted since for the Costa Novel Award for Instructions for a Heatwave in 2014 and This Must Be The Place in 2017. Her memoir I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death reached the top of the Sunday Times bestseller list. Her novel Hamnet won the Women's Prize for Fiction in 2020, the fiction prize at the 2020 National Book Critics Circle Awards, and was co-adapted for the screen with Chloe Zhao in 2025. Her 2022 historical novel The Marriage Portrait was shortlisted for the 2023 Women's Prize for Fiction.
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Betty Trask Award in the context of After You'd Gone
After You'd Gone is Northern Irish author Maggie O'Farrell's debut novel. Published in 2000 by Headline Review, it garnered 'international acclaim' and won a Betty Trask Award.
O'Farrell began writing the story that would later become "After You'd Gone" during an Arvon Foundation course in Yorkshire, where it received high praise from her tutors, Barbara Trapido and Elspeth Barker.