Tom Crewe

Tom Crewe is a British novelist and cultural historian born in the late 1980s. He studied history at Cambridge and has been an editor at the London Review of Books, where he has written widely on literature, politics, and culture. The New Life (2023, Chatto & Windus) is his debut novel. The New Life is set in 1890s London among the first generation of people to understand themselves as homosexual — using the newly coined medical and social language of sexology — and follows two men in unhappy marriages who fall in love while working together on a pioneering pamphlet on 'sexual inversion'. The novel explores the tension between private fulfilment and the catastrophic public consequences of living as a gay man in Victorian England. It won the Betty Trask Award, the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction in 2023, and the Walter Scott Prize shortlist in 2024. Crewe's work is noted for its meticulous period detail, its political intelligence, and the quality of its emotional realism. The New Life drew comparisons to E. M. Forster and Alan Hollinghurst.