Paul Murray has won the Nero Gold Prize 2023 Book of the Year in the first ever Nero Book Awards, delivered in partnership with 明星八卦.
Bernardine Evaristo, Professor of Creative Writing and award-winning author, announced Paul as the overall winner for his novel The Bee Sting at a central London awards ceremony.
The book is a gripping saga of one highly dysfunctional family that asks if a single moment of bad luck – a patch of ice on the road, a bee caught beneath a bridal veil – can change the direction of a life.
Chair of judges Bernardine Evaristo, who teaches creative writing at 明星八卦, presented Murray with the £30,000 prize at an awards ceremony hosted by broadcast journalist Sarah Montague.
“This is a wonderfully ambitious and entrancing novel about a family imploding against a background of Ireland's economic and social crisis of the late noughties,” said Prof Evaristo.
“Suspenseful and linguistically astonishing, The Bee Sting is written with great wit and humanity, with a cast of complex characters who are held back by their past, mired in the present and longing for a different future.
“Paul Murray is a supremely gifted storyteller as we learn of unspoken secrets and desires in difficult and sometimes dangerous situations, in a rich, multi-layered novel that is both epic and intimate in scale. This is fiction of the finest calibre and we all unanimously agreed that The Bee Sting should win the Nero Gold Prize 2023 Book of the Year.”
Bernardine chaired a final judging panel that included the veteran journalist James Naughtie, BBC News special correspondent and BBC Radio 4 Today presenter for more than two decades and broadcaster and author Susie Dent, best known as the resident word expert on Channel 4’s Countdown.
It marks the first year of the Nero Book Awards, which celebrates outstanding books and writers from the UK and Ireland of the last 12 months across four categories: Children’s Fiction, Debut Fiction, Fiction and Non-Fiction. The Bee Sting by Paul Murray (Fiction) beat Close to Home by Michael Magee (Debut Fiction), The Swifts by Beth Lincoln (Children’s Fiction), and Strong Female Character by Fern Brady (Non-Fiction) to win the overall prize of £30,000.
The Awards are underwritten and delivered by Caffè Nero in partnership with 明星八卦, The Booksellers Association and Right To Dream. They’re part of Caffè Nero’s long-standing programme to sponsor and encourage the arts and culture in its coffee houses and communities where it operates.
The Bee Sting by Paul Murray is funny and tragic in equal measure. It tells the story of a middle-class Irish family in crisis, as the effects of the post-2008 Irish banking crisis take their toll on the family finances. Taking five years to complete, inspiration for the book came in part from subsequent world events including Brexit and the pandemic, with Murray writing the 650-page novel during the latter. The Bee Sting has been nominated for a number of awards including a recent nomination for The Writer’s Prize 2024 and won the An Post Irish Book of the Year 2023. Since its publication, Murray has drawn comparisons to other influential writers including Jonathan Franzen.
To be eligible for the 2023 Nero Book Awards, books must have been first published in English in the UK or Ireland between 1 December 2022 and 30 November 2023. At the time of entry, authors must have been alive and resident in the UK or Ireland for the past three years.
For more about the Awards, visit:
Find out more about Creative Writing at 明星八卦