pictured alongside Chair of Judges Bernardine Evaristo (R) at the 2023 Nero Book Awards at HERE at Outernet London on March 14, 2024 in London, England. (Photo by Eamonn M. McCormack/Getty Images for Nero Book Awards)
Paul Murray wins inaugural £30,000 Nero Gold Prize Book of the Year
Paul Murray has won the Nero Gold Prize Book of the Year, becoming the first overall winner of the prestigious new literary prize.
The announcement was made on Thursday evening by award-winning author Bernardine Evaristo at an awards ceremony at Outernet in central London.
Evaristo said that The Bee Sting 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.
“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.”
Gerry Ford, Founder and Group CEO of Caffè Nero said that The Bee Sting is an exceptional book which carries emotion, honesty and authenticity. “To have such an impressive and well written book as the first winner of our Awards feels right. The Awards are designed to recognise great writers, great literature and a great read, and I think they have done exactly that.”
