Oxblood: Winner of the Sunday Times Charlotte Aitken Young Writer of the Year Award

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Every now and then I might hear him discussing his shift with my mother, always when they thought I was out of earshot. Tales of drunkenness, beatings, petty crime. A blistering portrait of a family on fire, Oxblood lays bare the horror of violence, the exile of grief, and the extraordinary power of love. And then there is Jan – the teenage tearaway running as fast as she can from her mother, her grandmother, and her own unnamed baby. To me, genres are ever-evolving narrative frameworks that expose our fears and fantasies, offering writers trenchant tools to interrogate, repurpose and vandalise. We might turn to genre for comfort: to escape the tedium, uncertainty and injustice of reality; but genre can also confront these horrors, directly or askance, and say something troubling and truthful about them. What projects are you working on? And then there is Jan - the teenage tearaway running as fast as she can from her mother, her grandmother, and her own unnamed baby.

Oxblood is one of those rare books where place and time are conjured so effortlessly, the caste of characters are drawn with so much ease and grace… Tom Benn is a seriously gifted writer and I’m keen to read whatever he does next.‘So, Ian as a love interest irritated me but Ian as a spy was ultra-cool. And, I wish there had been more of Claudia. She was incredibly intriguing and I would have enjoyed seeing her interact with Vic more than they did.

It’s about three generations of mothers in a crime family, living together in 1980s Wythenshawe, Manchester. The patriarchs are dead but their violent legacy traps these women together and also keeps them apart. I wanted to give expression to a place and an era, its moral canvas, and female perspectives. This meant I had to really take my time. It was rejected by two dozen publishers. What was their problem? My father was a police constable who was stationed at Longsight (and, for a time, at Benchill) and so, even though he would never have shared the reality of his job over the dinner table, as a teenager in the 60's I was savvy enough to sense some of what he was experiencing. Occasionally he would return home with his hand in plaster, after helping to beat a drunken Irishman into his cell.Over the course of a few days, the Dodds women must each confront the true legacy of the men who have defined their lives; and seize the opportunity to break the cycle for good. I recognised a lot of this description of the ‘80s while, at the same time, the life described in it is very different from what my own was at the time. This is the tale of three women of different generations in the same family, the youngest being roughly contemporaneous with me. Teenage girls, even more than now, were seen as appropriate sex objects then. You either had to veer away from it (as I did, hiding myself in oversized men’s suits and scary goth makeup) or lean into it, as love-starved Jan does here. I loved the character of Jan, the rebellious teenager who has just had her first child at fifteen/sixteen, a mixed-race baby she cannot bear to look at. Her affairs with her teacher and any young man who will look at her are both delightful and tough to read; Jan weaponises her femininity to get what she wants and also to find some comfort as her only bargaining chip in society, but she is also victimised and targeted and exploited by men. Her English teacher is written brilliantly, so skin-crawlingly disturbing and yet as distant as Jan sees him. Jan's grandmother's narrative, and her crumbling importance in the eyes of the community, was instantly recognisable and relatable; Benn wrote these women at the extremes of age and sexuality with realism. Over the course of a few days, Nedra, Carol and Jan must each confront the true legacy of the men who have defined their lives; and seize the opportunity to break the cycle for good. Tom Benn is one of publishing’s best kept secrets. His story about the struggles of three generations of women in a Manchester crime clan has been rendered with such care and specificity that it feels wholly original. The result is a rich, dark, atmospheric family saga that contains so much buried love and anger and grief and sexual jealousy and bitter disappointment. In fact, it’s one of the best contemporary novels about disappointment that I have ever read. Yet somehow I emerged from it exhilarated! I’m thrilled that we are rewarding a young writer who has been working below the radar for a while and is now finally getting the attention he deserves.‘

As much as I would like more on Italy, this is a thriller with a lot of action. It does a great job with characterization. Vic speaks and acts in a manner that the reader can understand why she might be called Vic instead of her full name of Victoria. You can imagine what Ian sounds like with his British accent. We do not spend a lot of time with her brother Gil, however, we do learn so much about him through Vic's eyes and memories. The reader can understand why they are so close and why Vic cannot stand by and wait for someone else to find and help her brother. But, she gets involved in something that is a lot more dangerous than she realizes. AnnaLisa completed her undergraduate degree in Human Services at Wingate University and her Master's degree in Counseling from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. During her thirteen years in the Human Services field, AnnaLisa worked with children in group homes and foster care, and spent two years in private practice counseling individuals, families, and couples. AnnaLisa is the youngest of four children and the only daughter, born and raised in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. After graduating high school, she moved to Charlotte, NC with her parents. This turned out to be a blessing since it was just a few short years later that she met her husband in the Film Actor's Studio of Charlotte. As she studied acting at the Studio, AnnaLisa was in several films and made-for-TV movies, as well as performed in local theater in both dramatic and musical roles. At one time, it was AnnaLisa's dream to be a professional singer. Set in a council house haunted by memories of dead family members, Benn’s unflinching storytelling unearths the forgotten working class voices left in the footnotes of Manchester’s industrial history, shrouded by criminal secrecy and steeped in a powerful emotional darkness which left this year’s judges’ ‘bowled over’ and certain that Tom Benn’s talent will only continue to ‘grow and grow’.

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The Charlotte Aitken Trust would like to thank the judges of this year’s award for producing such an outstanding shortlist. It is a showcase for the vitality and range of talent in a younger generation. Tom Benn’s novel Oxblood is a worthy winner, though the prize could have gone to any of the shortlist — which must have made the judges’ task especially hard. We warmly congratulate all four authors and look forward to watching their careers blossom.‘ This was definitely a great story. I loved the action, suspense, non blood family, betrayal, lies, secrets , mystery, bravery, human trafficing, even a little romancebut so much more. The plot was excellantsome errors in grammer and spelling but an easy fix and didn’t detract from the story. I loved all the ins and outs from this awesome storyespecially those with Vic and I highly recommend. One good thing about judging a prize like this is that you approach a book without context or preconception and get to just plunge in. And Oxblood is a book to get lost headlong in. Tom Benn manages to be heart-felt and attentive and generous, without ever resorting to being sentimental. In fact this is a book of anti-sentimental greatness, wonderfully written, deft and pungent and sensuous. It is brave too, telling a tale without fear of ugliness, without seeking to smooth over the bumps of lived life at all. It is honest and truthful, but also a great feat of fiction. And he writes amazing female characters as well. It felt right to give him the prize not just as a reward for this massive achievement, but as a nod towards the novels he’s going to write in the future, which we have a feeling will be great.‘ Victoria is a young woman who is working at a diner and has no real idea what she wants to do with her life. So instead she uses her brother going to law school as a reason for not going to school and furthering her education. While her brother is away in Italy for school, her and her best friend have end up living together with the occasional stop in from her Vic’s freeloading boyfriend. I loved Vic’s best friend and how she helped her not be so uptight about thing sometimes. We all need a person like that in our lives. As for the freeloading boyfriend he needs to go, and I was so happy when Vic finally stood up to him. Tom Benn is the winner of the 2022 Sunday Times Charlotte Aitken Young Writer of the Year Award for his novel, Oxblood Martin Doyle