Margaret McDonald becomes the youngest winner of the Carnegie Medal for Writing
Margaret McDonald, 27, has won the 2025 Carnegie Medal for Writing for Glasgow Boys, becoming the youngest winner in the medal's history.
Margaret McDonald has won the 2025 Carnegie Medal for Writing for Glasgow Boys (Faber). The winners were announced on 19 June 2025. At 27, McDonald is the youngest person to win the medal in its history of nearly a century. She is donating her £5,000 Colin Mears Award prize money to Action for Children.
Glasgow Boys follows two young men who grew up in the care system: Finlay, an eighteen-year-old nursing student, and Banjo, who is settling into foster care. It deals with mental health, trauma, inequality and identity in working-class Glasgow.
The Carnegie Medal for Illustration went to Olivia Lomenech Gill for Clever Crow, written by Chris Butterworth (Walker Books). The Shadowers' Choice Medals, voted for by young readers, went to Nathanael Lessore's King of Nothing and Theo Parish's Homebody. The awards are run by CILIP, the library and information association.
Why it matters: the Carnegies are judged by librarians and shadowed by reading groups in schools, so a win tends to put a book in front of young readers for years. A young-adult novel written in a regional voice winning the medal is also encouraging for writers told that dialect is a barrier to publication.
Sources: The Carnegies: 2025 winners announced; Publishing Perspectives: McDonald and Lomenech Gill win 2025 Carnegie Medals.