“ It’s incredibly helpful to win a prize like this with your first book,” Nick Hornby told us backstage at the Nero Book Awards last night (Wednesday 4 March 2026).
Hornby — the acclaimed author behind such beloved books as High Fidelity, Fever Pitch and About a Boy — served as the Head Judge at this year’s Nero Book Awards, which ultimately gave its top prize to debut author Claire Lynch for her book A Family Matter.
“I won a prize for my first book,” Hornby recalled, “and I know the difference that it made for me at the time. And it’s not just this one. It’s Claire’s second book, as well, which will have more attention as a result of the first book doing perhaps better than she might have anticipated because of the spotlight that will be on it after today.”
So, what made Lynch’s novel — which tells the story of a family torn apart by secrets across two generations — deserving of the prestigious Nero Gold Prize?
“We were all impressed with how confident a debut it was,” Hornby explained. “I mean, it’s not the sort of book where you think, ‘Oh, when she’s written three or four, she’ll be up and running’. It really feels like she knows what she’s doing straight away.
“I think, tonally, it was pitched perfectly. It’s moving, but it starts off with a sad and funny comic set piece. That, I think, immediately got us all on side. It’s got this dual time narrative, and the section of the book set in the past, set in the 1980s, was actually quite shocking, in terms of what it indicates about social morals in the eighties, which… the eighties feels quite close to me, and reading this book made it seem a lot further away.”
Nick Hornby (middle) with all the night’s winners (from left to right: Claire Lynch, Sarah Perry, Benjamin Wood and Jamila Gavin MBE). Nero Book Awards
Fans of Hornby’s own work will be wondering, of course, what is the man himself writing at the moment? We couldn’t help but ask.
Hornby revealed, “ Well, I’ve got a novel that I’m halfway through, which will be out next year.
“And I have three or four screenplays or TV series, all completely marooned at various points in the process. Waiting for money, waiting for cast, waiting for whatever.
“And that is a long and painful process, so I’m quite glad to be writing the book while that stuff’s going on.”
It’s good to have different irons in different fires, then? “ Yeah,” Hornby agreed. “There’s no point in waiting for these things to happen. They just take too long. So you just gotta let it go, move on with the next thing and hope something happens at some point.
Zoë Kravitz plays the lead role in the latest version of High Fidelity. Hulu
Speaking of screenplays, what has it been like for Hornby to see some of his works adapted for the screen for a second time? For example, High Fidelity has now become both a film (starring John Cusack in the year 2000) and a TV show (starring Zoë Kravitz in 2020).
“Well, things like that, the TV High Fidelity, it’s quite reassuring to think that it’s gone through its initial life, and yet it’s still alive. It means something to a whole different generation of people. It meant something to Zoë Kravitz, who’s a lot younger than me, and it spoke to her and it spoke to the people who adapted it.
“And you think, ‘Oh, okay, whatever it is, 30 years, it survived’. And I kind of enjoyed feeling that, perhaps more than when things are adapted immediately, or within their first phase of life, because that’s quite a well trodden route.
“More or less anything with a story and characters gets optioned by someone, somewhere along the food chain. Doesn’t mean it’ll be made, but sometimes it’s made. So you kind of get used to that. But things being made, then receding, then coming back, that is interesting.”
In Brooklyn, an Irish immigrant lands in 1950s America, where she quickly falls into a new romance. © 2015 Wildgaze Films (Brooklyn) Ltd / Coproductions Item 7 Inc / Parallel Films (Brooklyn) Limited / British Broadcasting Corporation / The British Film Institute. © 2016 Lionsgate Home Entertainment UK. All Rights Reserved.)
Hornby has also had a hand in adapting other people’s books for screen, notably working on the movie version of Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn. And with Brooklyn now having a sequel book, Long Island, is Hornby working on adapting it?
“ I was asked to do it,” Hornby admitted. “And I keep meaning to read it. I haven’t read it. I wanted to say no before I’d read it, because I didn’t want Colm Tóibín to think that I was turning it down because I didn’t think that book was as good as the previous one.
“I just knew that the film turned out pretty well, and I was anxious about going back on old territory, and everything not being quite as good as it was the first time. So, I think it’s much better that someone else does it.”
And has Hornby ever been to write sequels to any of his own books? “ I’ve had no interest so far,” he said.
“I think as long as I keep having ideas about different characters, then I’m gonna be working with those.”
And do fans ever ask him what happened next to certain characters? “Not so much,” Hornby said. “All Arsenal fans want a sequel to Fever Pitch, but I think I said everything I had to say in the first book.”
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On my bookshelf with… Nick Hornby
The book that made me want to be an author… was Anne Tyler’s Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, something that changed what I wanted to do with my writing. I’d been trying to write scripts up until that point, and when I read that, I thought, ‘Okay, I can see that there is a kind of writing that I hadn’t yet come across, something that was a little bit more direct and conversational, and could sort of see how I might manage prose in a way that I hadn’t seen until that point. So she was a big influence on me.
The book I’d recommend to anyone… is by an author who gets overlooked in the UK and I’ve yet to fail with in terms of recommendation. It’s the American writer Kevin Wilson, and his book, Nothing to See Here. I think if anyone’s stuck in their fiction-reading life, this is a book to get you unstuck.
The books I’m reading right now... I was lucky enough to get an early copy of the next Elizabeth Strout novel, and she’s a big inspiration to me. I love her work. I just finished that at the end of last week. And now I’ve moved on to the next book by Louise Kennedy, who wrote Trespasses.
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