Jenni Fagan's ‘visceral' memoir of growing up in care wins Gordon Burn prize

The Guardian

06-03-2025

A memoir about growing up in care has won this year's Gordon Burn prize.
Jenni Fagan was revealed as the winner of the £10,000 award for her book Ootlin at a ceremony in Newcastle on Thursday evening.
Fagan described the win as a 'huge honour'. The prize will allow Ootlin to 'begin to reach a far wider audience', which is 'vital so this book can begin to influence policymakers', she said. 'It is my greatest hope that Ootlin is used to help stop other children in the care system falling through all safety nets as I did repeatedly.'
By the age of seven, Fagan had lived in 14 different homes and had her name changed multiple times. 'There are a lot of kids out there being told they are less than everyone else. They are made unsafe by that story alone,' writes Fagan in the book, extracted for the Guardian.
'The government have a modern care system built on systems that are no longer fit for purpose,' she said after her win. 'It is time to change the story! We must see all children in the UK offered so much more. Safety, warmth, care, a home, food, an education and people who believe in them should be the very least of it.'
Ootlin was also recently longlisted for the Women's prize for nonfiction. Along with the memoir, Fagan has written four novels – The Panopticon, The Sunlight Pilgrims, Hex and Luckenbooth, the latter shortlisted for the Gordon Burn prize in 2021 – as well as several poetry collections.
'Ootlin is a story about a girl who found her only true home in books, who via those stories began to imagine a place where she might truly belong,' said Fagan.
Ootlin 'has haunted me since I read it, and it proudly moved me as both a work of art and a visceral contribution to an urgent and necessary debate about our care system and whether it is fit for purpose', said Claire Malcolm, the CEO of New Writing North and co-founder of the prize.
The Gordon Burn prize celebrates writing that has an unconventional perspective, style or subject matter. Founded in 2012 by New Writing North, Faber & Faber and the Gordon Burn Trust, it is named after the English writer known for experimental works who died in 2009.
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Shortlisted alongside Fagan for this year's prize were Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel, Mrs Jekyll by Emma Glass, Poor Artists by Gabrielle de la Puente and Zarina Muhammad (The White Pube), Only Here, Only Now by Tom Newlands, and The Lasting Harm: Witnessing the Trial of Ghislaine Maxwell by Lucia Osborne-Crowley.
The judging panel for this year's prize comprised the writers Terri White, Carl Anka, Angela Hui, Sarah Phelps and David Whitehouse. The award is open to all writers of any nationality for work written in English and published in the UK the previous year.
'All of the books on the shortlist deserve recognition, but Jenni Fagan's Ootlin is a singular achievement,' said Whitehouse. 'Everything about it – the language, the rhythm, the approach, the subject, the author – conspires to make a beautiful, vital, difficult, human piece of art.'
Past winners include Benjamin Myers, Peter Pomerantsev, Hanif Abdurraqib and Preti Taneja. Last year, Kathryn Scanlan won for her novel Kick the Latch.