Kaliane Bradley’s genre-defying time travel story The Ministry of Time, has made the cut

A Walthamstow author is among the six nominees vying to win the Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize 2024.

Kaliane Bradley’s genre-defying time travel story The Ministry of Time, has made the cut.

Kaliane, a British-Cambodian writer and editor, has had short stories published in Electric Literature, Catapult, Somesuch Stories and The Willowherb Review. She was the winner of the 2022 Harper’s Bazaar Short Story Prize and the 2022 V. S. Pritchett Short Story Prize. The Ministry of Time is her first novel.

She says: “As a former Waterstones bookseller, it is a complete joy to have come full circle. I trust the taste of booksellers – who are as much community nodes and literary counsellors as they are purveyors of goods – intrinsically, and it is such a high accolade that The Ministry of Time is nominated for the Waterstones Debut Prize.”

The Ministry of Time is set in the near-future and tells the story of a disaffected civil servant who is offered a lucrative job in a mysterious new government ministry gathering ‘expats’ from across history to test the limits of time-travel.

Waterstones has described it as “effortlessly blending love story, time-travelling tale and state-of-the-nation commentary to terrifyingly clever and ferociously funny effect”.

Last year’s winner of the Debut Fiction Prize, In Memoriam by Alice Winn, became the bestselling debut novel of 2023.

The winner will be announced at an evening ceremony on Thursday 25^th July and will receive a prize of £5,000 and the backing of all Waterstones shops.

Read the full Debut Fiction Prize shortlist here

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