Debut novelist, Graeme Armstrong, has won both a Betty Trask Award and a Somerset Maugham Award, in the annual awards presented by the Society of Authors.

The Betty Trask Award is given to writers under the age of 35, and The Somerset Award recognises books that travel. Judging the Somerset Maugham Award, Fred D'Aguiar said of THE YOUNG TEAM, “The Scottish language thrums and chimes in this novel; the hard lives bang against the anvil of received notions about brutality and vulnerability. The author's ear and empathy align in a universe perfectly pitched to broadcast the best route out of perdition.”

THE YOUNG TEAM was first published by Picador in 2020 to great acclaim, and became a Times Bestseller. Film rights are in development with Synchronicity Films. The novel tells of Azzy Williams, a young man whose character is inspired by Graeme’s own experience:

Azzy Williams is ready. Ready to smoke, pop pills, drink wine and ready to fight. But most of all, he’s ready to do anything for his friends, his gang, his young team.

Round here, in the schemes of the forgotten industrial heartland of Scotland, your mates, your young team – they’re everything.

Azzy Williams is fourteen; a rising star, this is his life and he loves it.
Azzy Williams is seventeen; he’s out of control.
Azzy Williams is twenty-one; he’d like to leave it all behind.
But a way out isn’t easy to find . . .

THE YOUNG TEAM is an energetic novel, full of the loyalty, laughs, mischief, boredom, violence and threat of life on these streets. It looks beyond the tabloid stereotypes to tell a powerful story about the realities of life for young people in Britain today.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Graeme Armstrong is a Scottish writer from Airdrie. His teenage years were spent within North Lanarkshire’s gang culture. He was inspired to study English Literature after reading Irvine Welsh’s TRAINSPOTTING at just sixteen. Alongside overcoming his own struggles with drug addiction, alcohol abuse and violence, he defied expectation to read English as an undergraduate at the University of Stirling; where, after graduating with honours, he returned to study a Masters’ in Creative Writing.

He regularly volunteers within the community visiting prisons and schools, giving talks on his experiences of gang-culture and substance abuse. He promotes a message of anti-violence and abstinence-based recovery.

PRAISE FOR THE YOUNG TEAM

“Sharp yet tender and mischievously funny, The Young Team pitches Armstrong straight into the first division of Scottish writers.” - The Guardian

‘Dialect that fizzes off the page’ – Observer

‘One of the most admired young voices in British fiction’ – The Times

Trezza Azzopardi’s THE HIDING PLACE is re-published today by Picador, as part of their Picador Classic series. Originally published in 2000, this intensely lyrical debut novel portrays the life of Dolores – the youngest of six daughters, growing up amidst a disintegrating family in 1960’s Cardiff.

When it was first released, THE HIDING PLACE won the 2001 Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, and was shortlisted for the prestigious Booker Prize. The edition published today features a beautiful new cover and an introduction by D. J. Taylor.

Dolores is the youngest of six daughters. Growing up in the 1960s in Cardiff's poverty stricken Tiger Bay, her life is cursed from the start when, on the day of her birth, her father gambles and loses everything on a bet that Dolores will be a boy. As Dolores grows older, we see the world through her eyes: Tiger Bay is a place of gaming rooms and cafes, of crumbling houses and burning secrets, and for Dolores and her sisters, their home is a dangerous place, filled equally by fear and love. Thirty years later, the estranged sisters return to Tiger Bay for their mother's funeral. It is a time of consolation, of memories and nightmares, and a chance for Dolores to understand the tragedy that has shaped her existence.

Praise for THE HIDING PLACE:

‘Vivid, moving, alive: The Hiding Place opens up ordinary-looking doors to let us into an intense and brilliantly foreign world.’ – Andrea Ashworth

'Dark and stifling images abound in this powerful first novel… Azzopardi is an assured magician when it comes to tricks to keep the reader turning the pages, despite the harshness of her material… An astonishingly accomplished book.’ – The Independent

‘THE HIDING PLACE has been compared with the work of Frank McCourt and Andrea Ashworth and it is not hard to see why. But Azzopardi’s book is fiction and it has a certain poise and cohesion of theme that cannot be achieved in memoir…. Azzopardi has written a scalding, thrilling book about the havoc and despair it is possible to wreak inside a family; but also how the bonds formed within it cannot be destroyed by violence, poverty, time, fire – anything.’ – The Observer

‘The unsentimental quality and the constant beauty of Azzopardi’s writing … She has clearly mastered principles of precision and control, holding the reader throughout with a deft touch.’ – The Times

‘A writer of remarkable sensibility and literary prowess …readers will be riveted by this brilliantly psychological prose poem of a family united only in helplessness and despair, in a poverty-stricken corner of the world rarely seen in fiction.’ – Publishers Weekly

Trezza Azzopardi was born and grew up in Cardiff, and teaches Creative Writing at UEA. Her novels REMEMBER ME (2004) and WINTERTON BLUE (2007) were both listed for the Wales Book of the Year. Her latest novel, THE SONG HOUSE, was serialised on BBC Radio 4. The novella, THE TIP OF MY TONGUE, based on one of the tales from The Mabinogion, was published in October 2013.