The evening I found out I had won the Harvill Secker Prize, remains one of those strangely suspended moments in time — a collision of disbelief, elation, and a quiet sense of something shifting permanently beneath my feet.

I was sitting staring out of my Brighton hotel window, wondering if the rainy, dark evening was worth a challenge to go see a big-screen Liverpool football match. I was mixing drinks with the ice I’d got from the bar when the unexpected phone call vibrated on the bed. I thought it was a conference colleague, so I picked up.

The voice on the other end belonged to a woman with a bright, unmistakably Scottish accent, who asked, with a polite urgency, whether I had read my emails. That question alone told me she clearly didn’t know me well — email, for me, is more of a digital avalanche to avoid than a daily practice. I confessed, somewhat evasively, that I hadn’t looked recently.

“You might want to check,” she said, her tone warm but resolutely professional.

There it was, in my inbox — the official notification informing me that I had won the Harvill Secker Prize. I read it once, too quickly to fully process the weight of the words. I read it again, more slowly, convinced I had misunderstood. Perhaps I had been shortlisted, perhaps I was a runner-up — some honourable mention to celebrate proximity rather than achievement. But the text was unambiguous.

I had won.

What struck me most in that moment was the cognitive dissonance between the ordinariness of my surroundings — the cluttered desk, the half-finished cup of tea — and the extraordinary nature of the news itself. My hands hovered awkwardly over the keyboard, uncertain of the appropriate response, either to the email or to my own sense of astonishment.

There was happiness, of course — a kind of quiet, dawning joy — but also something more complex. Winning meant visibility, expectation, the pressure to deliver on the promise of that recognition. It meant stepping into a space I had always wanted to occupy, but which now felt both exhilarating and precarious.

For the rest of the evening, in between watching my favourite team win and trying to keep it a secret as instructed, I kept returning to that email, as though the act of rereading might anchor its reality. It was, and remains, a moment of profound gratitude — not just for the prize itself, but for the validation that comes from knowing the work, at least for now, had found its audience.