What did winning the HWA Debut Crown Award mean to me?

To explain what winning an award – any award – but particularly the HWA Debut Crown - means to me as an author, I probably need to tell you where I’m from. Not geographically (Milton Keynes) but more in relation to the way I used to see myself as a kid, and the limits I placed on myself as I grew up.

I was a very quiet kid in school and, while I got on pretty well with my studies, I struggled a lot with fitting in. There’s a line in my new novel The Betrayal of Thomas True that reads: ‘In spite of his love of nature and talent for artistic pursuits, boyhood was a skill Thomas could never master.’ I got a bit emotional when I wrote that because it somehow seemed to encapsulate, for the first time, how I still feel about my childhood. 

I wasn’t very good at being a boy. In fact, by the standards of other boys, I was hopeless at it. There wasn’t a football or fist that didn’t hit my face at play times, and there was a lot of wetting myself going on. I would run upstairs and hide at my own birthday parties. I was shy, studious, socially awkward, terrible at anything sporty, and camp as Butlins (though my family were too poor for Butlins so we had to make do with Pontins, which I actually remember enjoying. One of those ice creamy childhood memories filled with endless carefree sunshine. I can see it now: me on a beach in swimmers and a woolly jumper watching a man in a cloth cap killing jellyfish with a rake under the looming shadow of a nuclear power plant). I feel sad that I trained myself to be less camp over the years. There’s a video of me aged 10 and I honestly can’t believe how fabulously expressive my hands are. My eyerolls are magnificent (my mum messed up a pot on the wheel I’d received for my birthday, hopeless matriarch!) I watched the grainy footage of that boy in his fluorescent shell suit realising just how much I’d shut myself down as a teenager in an effort to be popular and safe. I’d cut myself up and rearranged the pieces to be a young man who would go on to look the part, but always feel disarranged.

Ah well, leave your violins where they are. I wouldn’t wish the bullying and homelife I endured on any child, but many had it worse and there was one lovely thing that came from my struggle: I read all the books I could find. I have a sneaking suspicion you were the same for your own reasons, so I’m not going to bore you with how that went but let’s just say it was a love affair that informs everything I do and without it I would honestly have died inside. I might have died outside, but I was an indoors cat. Instead, my books rescued me and showed me a bigger, happier world where fears were overcome and mistakes learned from. I devoured those stories, from The Wind in the Willows to Point Horror, Jeffrey Deaver, then on to the light stuff like Jude the Obscure and The Wasp Factory. I like to think those books made me the grate writer what I is today.

The difficulty, the isolation, the raw emotions in those stories gave me – how to put it? Let me think… well, did you ever get a huge pack of coloured pencils as a present? No, bigger than that; the ones the size of those massive chocolate bars they sell at Christmas where they’ve replaced Dairy Milk with Dave. I can still remember the smell. Not Dave, the pencils. I sometimes go into stationers and sniff their pencils. It is a fetish of the soul. Ochre, vermillion, alizarin crimson, cadmium yellow, Prussian blue… I think my early years combined with my books gave me a pack of pencils like that, and when I sit down to write, I open them up and know instantly how I’d like to mix them together, and fill the book with as many shades and shadows as possible. Light strokes for the pale sky, then press so hard for the tragedy the paper goes shiny. If I find, on a hangover day, that I’m writing in basic blue and grungy green, I know I’m not drawing on my life properly and make a sandwich.

What is the point of all this? Well, I’m trying my best to explain how I came to be a passionate and confident reader and writer while at the same time suffering constant bouts of paranoia and self-doubt. Even when my debut novel The Spirit Engineer was nominated for an HWA award, I framed it in my mind as an opportunity to let myself down. I even considered asking to be removed, not through ingratitude you understand – nor a pang of false humility – but because I was exhausted after my first experience of publication, and worried the hope might get too much. That I might hide from the party, just as I used to.

I felt my younger self watching. I had dreamed that one day I would leave all the worry and solitude behind and stand among authors with my own book in my hands. That little boy didn’t know very much about awards, but he knew what he wanted to be when he grew up. And I didn’t want to let him down.

I had to tell myself to stop being such a self-indulgent idiot, and fully appreciate the fact that my peers were going to take a look at the merits of my writing with a kind eye. If I didn’t win, it was still a big compliment, and there were some truly fantastic debuts in 2022. 

Reader, I won – or rather my book did – and it has changed a lot for me. Booksellers and industry friends have a lot of respect for the HWA and rightly so. I like to think the award reflects the work I put in, research, writing and publishing something different. And when it was revealed that Ayo, Dan, and Susan had chosen The Spirit Engineer as their winner, I was reminded that the kid with no friends had been right to hope. Not because he needed an award to prove anything, but because one day, if he could just hold on long enough and keep trying, there would be people who’d value his imagination and hard work and wouldn’t judge him for writing about himself in third person. 

Love and thanks. Onwards!

The Betrayal of Thomas True by A J West (Orenda Books) Published 4 July 2024

It is the year 1710, and Thomas True has arrived on old London Bridge with a dangerous secret. One night, lost in the squalor of London’s hidden back streets, he finds himself drawn into the outrageous underworld of the molly houses.  Meanwhile, carpenter Gabriel Griffin struggles to hide his double life as Lotty, the molly’s stoic guard. When a young man is found murdered, he realises there is a rat amongst them, betraying their secrets to a pair of murderous Justices Can Gabriel unmask the traitor before they hang? Can he save hapless Thomas from peril, and their own forbidden love? Set amidst the buried streets of Georgian London, The Betrayal of Thomas True is a brutal and devastating thriller, where love must overcome evil, and the only true sin is betrayal… 

More information about A J West can be found on his website. He can also be found on X @AJWestAuthor, on instagram @A.J.West and on Facebook