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2025 Prize

2025 Winner: We Live Here Now by C.D. Rose

Amy Sackville, Chair of Judges:
“A book about what art is and what it does (or doesn’t do), C.D. Rose’s We Live Here Now in its turn asks profound questions of the contemporary world and the systems that power it, in the aether, deep under the surface, far out at sea. Motifs emerge and recur: containers, erasures, shady markets, sound and silence, ‘echo and drone’. This constellatory novel tests the bounds of the form while delivering all of its satisfactions: at once hilarious and deeply haunting, intellectually challenging and supremely entertaining.”

The 2025 shortlist

Read our news story about this year's winner. 

 

The Judges

Amy Sackville (Chair)

Amy Sackville (Chair) is the author of the novels Painter to the King (Granta, 2018), Orkney (Granta, 2013), which received a Somerset Maugham Award, and The Still Point (Portobello, 2010), which won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. 

She is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Goldsmiths. 

Mark Haddon

Mark Haddon is the author of four novels, including The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, and two collections of short stories, including Dogs and Monsters (2024).

He has published one poetry collection and written drama for radio, TV and stage. He lives in Oxford. 

Megan Nolan

Megan Nolan is an Irish writer and broadcaster based in New York. Her debut novel Acts of Desperation was published in 2021 and was an international bestseller. Her second, Ordinary Human Failings, was published in 2023 and was shortlisted for the Orwell prize for Political Fiction, the Nero Prize for Fiction, The Gordon Burn Prize, The Royal Society of Literature Encore Award, and longlisted for the Women’s Prize.

She is currently at work on her first book of non-fiction.  

Simon Okotie

Simon Okotie is the author of The Future of the Novel (a book-length essay forthcoming in Spring '25) and the Absalon novels: ‘Fiction as original as this deserves a long shelf life.’ (London Review of Books).

He lives in London.