Alice Winn has won the 2023 Waterstones debut fiction prize for her novel In Memoriam, which has been described as a “truly stunning feat of fiction”.
The novel, inspired by archive clippings from a student newspaper, chronicles the love story between two first world war soldiers. It was announced as the winner at a ceremony in London on Thursday evening.
Winn told the Guardian that she felt “joy and shock” at the result. She described being “absolutely grief-stricken” after stumbling upon the “the most incredibly devastating, raw, visceral” newspapers, and so her win was “meaningful and gratifying”.
“We were all blown away by Alice’s powerful and emotive storytelling and intimate command of her epic historical canvas”, said Bea Carvalho, head of books and campaigns at Waterstones, adding that the future of fiction was “in safe hands” with novelists such as Winn.
“The rush of the plot, alternating between the perspectives of Ellwood and Gaunt, takes us through the shattering events of 1914-18 and affectingly shows us the marks it leaves on them,” wrote Christopher Shrimpton in a Guardian review of the novel.
Winn will receive £5,000 and the “promise of ongoing commitment” to her writing career. Her novel was selected from a shortlist of six books, which also featured Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Fire Rush by Jacqueline Crooks, Close to Home by Michael Magee, Wandering Souls by Cecile Pin and Kala by Colin Walsh.
In Memoriam was selected by a panel of Waterstones retail staff as the best work of debut fiction written in English and published by a UK publisher. Winn grew up in Paris, attended boarding school in the UK and now lives in Brooklyn and writes screenplays. The author said that she wrote three novels “that never got an agent” before getting her debut published.
Her novel was “a truly stunning feat of fiction which manages to be at once desperately heart-shattering and full of hope, and comfortingly classic yet daringly original”, said Carvalho.
Waterstones launched the prize in 2022, and the inaugural winning book was The Rabbit Hutch by Tess Gunty. The title subsequently enjoyed a sales increase of 800%, and it went on to win the 2022 National Book Award for fiction and the Barnes and Noble Discover prize as well as being optioned for screen.
