The Killing Jar (Chatto and Windus) is the debut novel of Nicola Monaghan, published in March 2006. It tells the story of Kerrie Ann Hill, a young girl growing up on a drug-ridden housing estate in Nottingham. Kerrie Ann meets an elderly neighbour when she's young, Mrs Ivanovich, an entomologist who teaches Kerrie about life, death, the Amazon rainforest and the miniature, alien world of insects. "Kez" struggles to look after her brother Jon, and hold things together as she's brought up by her junkie mum, Sue, and later, living with her boyfriend Mark as he becomes more and more involved with heroin and crack cocaine.
The book explores themes of metamorphosis, the highs and lows of drugs, and how people become trapped by poisoned environments, and what it takes to escape them.
Monaghan was included in The Independent's New Year list of "Rising Talent of 2006" and The Killing Jar made their 50 Hot Books for summer and Books of Year features. It went on to win a Betty Trask Award The Authors' Club Best First Novel Award, [1] and the Waverton Good Read Award. [2]
 | This article about a 2000s novel is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. See guidelines for writing about novels. Further suggestions might be found on the article's talk page. |
The University of East Anglia's Creative Writing Course was founded by Sir Malcolm Bradbury and Sir Angus Wilson in 1970. The M.A. is widely regarded as the most prestigious and successful in the country and competition for places is notoriously tough.
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 £20,000, with one author receiving a larger prize amount, called the "Prize", and the remainder given to one or more other writers, called the "Awards". The award was established in 1984 by the Society of Authors, at the bequest of the late Betty Trask, a reclusive author of over thirty romance novels. The awards are given to traditional or romantic novels, rather than those of an experimental style, and can be for published or unpublished works.
Kiran Desai is an Indian author. Her novel The Inheritance of Loss won the 2006 Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Fiction Award. In January 2015, The Economic Times listed her as one of 20 "most influential" global Indian women.
If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things is British writer Jon McGregor's first novel, which was first published by Bloomsbury in 2002. It portrays a day in the life of a suburban British street, with the plot alternately following the lives of the street's various inhabitants. All but one person's viewpoint is described in the third person, and the narrative uses a flowing grammatical style which mimics their thought processes.
Jon McGregor is a British novelist and short story writer. In 2002, his first novel was longlisted for the Booker Prize, making him then the youngest ever contender. His second and fourth novels were longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2006 and 2017 respectively. In 2012, his third novel, Even the Dogs, was awarded the International Dublin Literary Award. The New York Times has labelled him a "wicked British writer".
Simon Mason is a British author of juvenile and adult fiction.
Nicola Monaghan is an English novelist and author of The Killing Jar, Starfishing and The Okinawa Dragon. She grew up in Nottingham, England, and gave up a career in finance to pursue an MA in creative writing at Nottingham Trent University.
Maggie O'Farrell, RSL, 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. She appeared in the Waterstones 25 Authors for the Future. 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, and the fiction prize at the 2020 National Book Critics Circle Awards.
The Authors' Club Best First Novel Award is awarded by the Authors' Club to the most promising first novel of the year, written by a British author and published in the UK during the calendar year preceding the year in which the award is presented.
Ross Raisin FRSL is a British novelist.
Kate Saunders is an English writer, actress and journalist. She has won the Betty Trask Award and the Costa Children's Book Award and been twice shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal.
Nadifa Mohamed is a Somali-British novelist. She featured on Granta magazine's list "Best of Young British Novelists" in 2013, and in 2014 on the Africa39 list of writers aged under 40 with potential and talent to define future trends in African literature. Her 2021 novel, The Fortune Men, was shortlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize, making her the first British Somali novelist to get this honour. She has also written short stories, essays, memoirs and articles in outlets including The Guardian, and contributed poetry to the anthology New Daughters of Africa. She was also a lecturer in Creative Writing in the Department of English at Royal Holloway, University of London until 2021. She will be Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University in Spring 2022.
The Soldier's Song is the debut novel from Alan Monaghan and the first in the Soldier's Song Trilogy.
Annabel Pitcher is a British children's writer.
Evelyn Rose Strange "Evie" Wyld is an Anglo-Australian author. Her first novel, After the Fire, A Still Small Voice, won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize in 2009, and her second novel, All the Birds, Singing, won the Encore Award in 2013 and the Miles Franklin Award in 2014. Her third novel, The Bass Rock, won the Stella Prize in 2021.
After the Fire, A Still Small Voice is the debut novel by author Evie Wyld published in August 2009 by Jonathan Cape in the UK and Pantheon Books in the US. It won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and a Betty Trask Award. and was also shortlisted for both the Orange Award for New Writers and International Dublin Literary Award.
Anjali Joseph is an Indian novelist. Her first novel, Saraswati Park (2010), earned her several awards, including the Betty Trask Prize and Desmond Elliott Prize. Her second novel, Another Country, was released in 2012. In 2010, she was listed by The Telegraph as one of the 20 best writers under the age of 40. Her third novel, The Living (2016), was shortlisted for the DSC Prize and is a tender, lyrical and often funny novel which shines a light on everyday life. Her fourth novel Keeping in Touch, was published in India in 2021 by Context and in the UK in 2022 by Scribe.
Rowan Hisayo Buchanan is a British-American writer. Her novels include Harmless Like You, which received a Betty Trask Award and the 2017 Author's Club First Novel Award, and Starling Days. She is the editor of Go Home!, an anthology of stories by Asian American writers.
Yvvette Edwards FRSL is a British novelist born in London, England, of Caribbean heritage. Her first novel, A Cupboard Full of Coats, was published in 2011 to much acclaim and prize nominations that included the Man Booker Prize longlist and the Commonwealth Book Prize shortlist. Edwards followed this debut work five years later with The Mother (2016), a novel that "reinforces her accomplishment". She is a contributor to the 2019 anthology New Daughters of Africa, edited by Margaret Busby.
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.