Following the announcement of the category winners in January, we have been eagerly awaiting the announcement of the Nero Gold Prize, Book of the Year 2023. Last night at an awards ceremony held at HERE at Outernet in central London, the Chair of Judges announced the winner as Paul Murray for The Bee Sting. 

The Bee Sting is a wise, thought-provoking and irresistibly funny novel about family, fortune and the struggle to be a good person when the world is falling apart. You can read the full synopsis of the book here.

At the ceremony, Chair of Judges, Bernadine Evaristo presented Murray with the £30,000 prize. When talking about The Bee Sting, Evaristo commented: “This is a wonderfully ambitious and entrancing novel about a family imploding against a background of Ireland’s economic and social crisis of the late noughties. Suspenseful and linguistically astonishing, The Bee Sting is written with great wit and humanity, with a cast of complex characters who are held back by their past, mired in the present and longing for a different future. Paul Murray is a supremely gifted storyteller as we learn of unspoken secrets and desires in difficult and sometimes dangerous situations, in a rich, multi-layered novel that is both epic and intimate in scale. This is fiction of the finest calibre and we all unanimously agreed that The Bee Sting should win the Nero Gold Prize 2023 Book of the Year.”

Evaristo chaired the final judging panel that included broadcaster Susie Dent and veteran journalist James Naughtie.

The Nero Book Awards run by Caffè Nero serve as a replacement in the book awards calender for the Costa Book Awards. 2023 was the inaugural book awards and saw over 100 publishers and imprints submit hundreds of books to be considered for the four different awards categories: Debut Fiction, Fiction, Non-Fiction and Children's Fiction. After the category winners have been announced the judges deliberate again to decide which of these category winners will receive the additional accolade of Book of the Year by awarding them the Nero Gold Award.

The Nero Book Awards is a not-for-profit organisation and look to highlight the skill and craft behind great writing as well as celebrate the joy of reading and providing readers of all tastes with a combination of high-quality writing and readability. 

You can shop the winner below, saving 10% and donating up to 25% to a school close to your heart or one in need. You can also find out more about the category winners and shop this year's full shortlists here.