Since its launch 17 years ago, the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year award has become an unfailingly reliable guide to the best new British literary talent. Authors first spotted by our judges have gone on to win or be shortlisted for a host of other prizes – the Man Booker (Zadie Smith, Caryl Phillips and Sarah Waters), the Wolfson (William Dalrymple), the Forward (Paul Farley), the TS Eliot (Simon Armitage). There really is no other literary award like it.

The shortlist for this year’s prize, open to British authors under 35, more than maintains those giddily high standards. All four nominees – Adam Foulds, Nikita Lalwani, Robert Macfarlane and James McConnachie – write with pace, panache and literary flair.

Adam Foulds, a graduate of the creative-writing school that produced Ian McEwan and Kazuo Ishiguro, has concentrated in his delightful and delicately written fiction debut, The Truth About These Strange Times (Weidenfeld £12.99), on two memorable odd-balls – Howard, an overweight and undereducated loner who can’t hold down a steady job, and Saul, a delicate, pin-sharp 10-year-old being force-fed facts by his father ahead of the World Memory Championships. When Howard is brought into Saul’s family as an odd-job man, it precipitates all manner of crises, including a police manhunt. “Not only is this extremely fine novel written with a wonderful clarity and precision,” wrote Peter Parker in his Sunday Times review, “but Foulds inhabits his two very different characters with absolute conviction.”

A young prodigy also takes centre stage in the second novel on the shortlist, Gifted by Nikita Lalwani (Viking £16.99). Maths genius Rumi – 10 years, two months, 13 days, two hours, 42 minutes and six seconds old when we first meet her – has known since she was five she was “different”, but her increasingly strained efforts not to stand out from the crowd are complicated by her Asian parents’ ambitions for her. As our reviewer Elizabeth Buchan said, “Lalwani conveys the confusions of Rami’s developing body and mind with charm and warmth . . . and pinpoints with genuine insight the bewilderment and anguish of a young woman marked out from her peers.”

“Elegant”, “stylish”, “fascinating” are just a few of the adjectives that James McConnachie will have treasured from the reviews of his debut The Book of Love: In Search of the Kamasutra (Atlantic £8.99). Skipping effortlessly over 1,700 years of history, his beautifully written book charts the genesis of this much-misunderstood 3rd-century manual, and traces its dissemination by 19th-century western scholars and adventurers, several of them men with alarming personal peccadilloes.

Although Robert Macfarlane has already won the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year award in 2004 for his crystal-clear meditation on the world’s high places, Mountains of the Mind, at 31 he is still young enough to be shortlisted again for his second book, The Wild Places (Granta £18.99). Macfarlane, who will be discussing his book at the Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival on Friday, April 4 at 4pm and talking to Richard Mabey the following day at 8pm, takes his readers in search of Britain’s last wild places, from Sandwood Bay on the northern edge of Scotland to the shingle spit of Orford Ness in Suffolk. Achingly poetic, the book also asks pertinent questions about the nature of “wildness” itself. As Philip Marsden wrote in his review, “Macfarlane’s language urges us to gaze more closely at the wonders around us, to take notice, to remind ourselves how thrillingly alive a spell in the wild can make us feel.”

The judges for this year’s award are Susannah Herbert (Sunday Times literary editor), Andrew Holgate (deputy literary editor) and Peter Kemp (fiction editor). The winner will be announced, and a cheque for £5,000 handed over, at a special lunch at the Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival on Sunday, April 6.

OXFORD: WHERE TO STAY AND HOW TO BOOK

This year’s Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival runs at Christ Church from Monday, March 31 to Sunday, April 6. To get a flavour of the festival, and to immerse yourself fully in the atmosphere of Christ Church, you can stay at the college, either by booking individual rooms for a starting price of £53 per night, B&B, or by taking advantage of our two-night festival packages, available exclusively to Sunday Times readers:

March 31-April 1: accommodation and breakfast at Christ Church, plus tickets to see Sebastian Faulks, Clarissa Eden, Oliver James and Rita Carter. Prices from £130.

April 2-3: accommodation and breakfast at Christ Church, plus tickets to see Seamus Murphy discussing Afghanistan with Anthony Loyd; the Penguin readers’ evening with Catherine Bailey, Jane Johnson and Jeremy Page; Dragons’ Den judge Peter Jones; Mark Tully; and Adam Mars-Jones talking to Margaret Drabble. Prices from £137.

To book your stay, call 01865 286848/286877 or e-mail festival@chch.ox.ac.uk.

BOOKING TICKETS

To book tickets for events at the festival, go online at www.ticketsoxford.com (24hr booking until March 31 at 10am) or telephone 0870 343 1001.

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