The thing about writing, and especially writing your first book, is that it’s done in the darkness, alone, in stolen snatches of time, without any expectation that anyone else will read it at all. So for that small, solitary piece of work to be read, and not just read but shared, and enjoyed and discussed and thought about so deeply and curiously, is astonishing. And this, the greatest astonishment of all: The Artist being named Waterstones Book of the Year.
Thank you to every single reader who embraced this book. And my wildest, hugest thanks to the Waterstones booksellers who placed it in their hands. They have been the greatest, most galvanising champions a writer could dream of.
Thank you for loving this hot, sticky, sweaty book full of mouldy fruit and painty fingerprints and a house full of secrets!
I am so enormously, wildly honoured to have won the Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize 2025! This prize has championed some of my absolute favourite books over the past few years, and so to join their ranks is stunning and overwhelming.
Thank you to all the booksellers who read and loved and shared The Artist! Thank you to my incredible publishing team, each and every one of you. Thank you to Waterstones for the most unforgettable evening in which I was very shaky and very grateful.
- Post speech speechlessness!
- Debut Fiction Prize winners 2023-2025
- The 2025 shortlist: Niamh, Lisa, Will, Catherine and Gurnaik 🤍 Part of the reason I didn’t expect to win was because I had read their books! They are excellent! Read them!
- Someone made Will a shirt based on his book!
- Waterstones special edition (it has a ribbon bookmark!)
- Waterstones Piccadilly window
- Heart and arms very full
- The actual artist is this bookseller from Waterstones in Wells
📸 Jaynie Heckel
Absolutely overwhelmed that The Artist has been longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2025!
Being listed for the Women’s Prize is a once-in-a-lifetime, outrageously aspirational, maybe-one-day-this-could-happen level of dream, and so for it to happen a few weeks after The Artist was published is… nothing short of astonishing. I am so honoured, and so delighted.
The Artist is on the longlist alongside 15 exceptional books by 15 exceptional writers. I can’t wait to read them all.
Thank you so much to the Women’s Prize judges and to all my brilliant people at @johnmurrays , @rcwliteraryagency and @pew_literary . Thank you for taking a chance on this manuscript. It is the most incredible adventure.
@womensprize #WomensPrize
Un gran honor to hold the Spanish edition of The Artist in my hands! Thank you to Laura Castro Trullén for translating it so beautifully.
It’s been so interesting to work with translators and publishers whose languages use gendered nouns. There’s an ambiguity to English which means imprecision is built into it, but as a writer you can often use this imprecision to your advantage, and play around with its double meanings. Is The Artist a male artist or a female artist? The English title gives nothing away, but with Spanish we had to decide: El Artista or La Artista?
Giving the title a gender would, I think, alter the way you read the book. There’s a duality to the English title which means you don’t actually have to decide if it’s a male artist or a female artist; you can enter the book believing the artist is one gender and leave believing it’s another. So with the Spanish translation we lopped off the ‘The’ altogether, and went with ‘Artista’. Maybe the lack of an ‘El or ‘La’ in itself will be an oddity in Spanish, a signal that some obfuscation is afoot? If so, it’s a nice extra little mystery before you open the first page.
(It’s been fascinating to see how different languages have tackled this! In German we couldn’t decide between ‘der’ or ‘die’ so just went with ‘The Artist’, and my French publisher put her hand on her heart and sighed ‘Thank God the word for male and female artist is the same in French.’ So L’Artiste it is.)
It’s paperback time! (In North America)
She’s looking nifty, she’s looking portable. And I’m very honoured that she’s Book of the Month in Barnes and Noble!
Thank you to everyone who has sent me pictures from Illinois to Colorado to Massachusetts. Seeing those stacks of books never ceases to be an immense thrill.
I’m so honoured that The Artist has been shortlisted for a British Book Award!
When the book was going to print the @johnmurrays team had to politely ask me to cut down my Acknowledgements because they were nearing deforestation levels of paper. There are so many people behind this book! So I am very glad they get to be celebrated properly and effusively here.
And a special hooray for my phenomenal agent Eleanor, who is the force behind ⅓ of this entire list and also most good things.
The Artist em português!
Happy Portuguese birthday to this beautiful edition, translated by Sónia Maia. It is wonderful and strange to see a book you wrote but cannot read. My words are in there, and I can feel the shape of the story, but I can no longer read it. It is surreal, that lexical alchemy.
I love that the Portuguese title sounds like a lament. O Artista! I love that I have learned new words: festim, incêndio, estranho. And I love that one of the people the book is dedicated to will be able to read it even though I can’t: o meu pai 🧡
A delight and an honour to be longlisted for the Walter Scott Prize.
It’s especially wonderful to be included on such a thoughtful and enticing list of books; they look sharp and curious and original. I’ve read and loved some of them already, and can’t wait to read the rest.
One year of The Artist being out in the world.
An astonishing and unexpected year. I’ve always been quite sanguine about the fact that once a book is published, it’s no longer mine. It’s on its own journey, finding its readers, becoming its own self. And so it’s been the greatest wonder to see all the places The Artist has gone, and the readers it’s found.
Some people have painted scenes from the book. Some people have written piano scores based on it. People have woven it onto T shirts and jumpers. Some readers went to the south of France to read it in the heat of Provence. People made memes about it. Someone traced the cover into a cup of coffee. Someone spun a miniature version of the book out of sugar and placed it on a birthday cake. People have said they look at art differently because of it. People have picked up paintbrushes for the first time. Readers have taken their copies to galleries and museums. I have been sent so many pictures of rotting food. People have messaged me kind and secret things. I have signed copies with their pages folded down, and ink filling the margins, and had the most wonderous, fascinating conversations. People have found things in this book I never even knew were there.
These little scraps of ideas that once existed only in my head are now on pages and sewn into fabric and transmuted into musical notes.
Thank you, to everyone who’s been part of this year. It’s been unfathomable.
