Ashani Lewis takes two prizes at the 2025 Society of Authors' Awards
Ashani Lewis won both the Betty Trask Prize and a Somerset Maugham Award for Winter Animals at the 2025 Society of Authors' Awards.
The Society of Authors announced the winners of its 2025 awards in June 2025, at a ceremony at Southwark Cathedral in London. Ashani Lewis was the only writer to win more than one award, taking the £10,000 Betty Trask Prize and a £4,000 Somerset Maugham Award for her novel Winter Animals (Dialogue Books), £14,000 in total.
Winter Animals follows Elen, a woman estranged from her husband, who falls in with a group of wealthy squatters and discovers the secret behind their wish to escape. The Betty Trask Prize is for a first novel by a writer under 35.
The McKitterick Prize, for a first novel by a writer over 40, went to Tom Newlands for Only Here, Only Now. The awards cover poetry, fiction and non-fiction and together shared a prize fund of more than £170,000.
Why it matters: the Society of Authors' awards are among the few that deliberately split debut writers by age, so that a first novel published at 45 is not judged against one published at 25. For writers who came to fiction later, the McKitterick in particular remains one of the more meaningful sources of recognition and money.
Sources: The Bookseller: Ashani Lewis wins two prizes at the 2025 SoA Awards; LoveReading: the 2025 SoA Awards winners.