Alice Winn announced herself as one of the most exciting new voices in historical fiction with her debut novel In Memoriam, published in 2023. The book, a devastating love story set in the trenches of World War I, won the Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize, the Waterstones Novel of the Year, the British Book Awards Debut Book of the Year, and the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. Critics called it “Birdsong for a new generation.”
She is the rare debut novelist whose first book feels immediately classic: fully formed, emotionally devastating, and written with a confidence that belies the fact that it is her first published work.
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About Alice Winn
Early Life and Background
Alice Mary Felicity Winn was born on 20 December 1992 in Paris, France, to Irish and American parents. She holds Irish citizenship. Growing up in Paris gave her a multilingual upbringing and an early exposure to European culture and history, but she describes having a “tenuous grasp” of her own identity, belonging to multiple places and none completely.
She has dyslexia and did not learn to read until she was nine years old. This late start with books made the act of reading meaningful to her in a way it might not have been had it come easily. She was educated at Marlborough College in England, the boarding school where the student newspapers that would eventually inspire In Memoriam are archived. She then read English literature at St Peter’s College, Oxford.
Writing Career
After graduating from Oxford, Winn set herself a goal: she would write a novel a year until she wrote one that was good. She produced three unpublished novels in quick succession, none quite right. She also worked on screenplays and taught homeschooled children.
In 2019, she came across the student newspapers from Marlborough College, published between 1913 and 1919. She had originally been searching for traces of Siegfried Sassoon, who had attended the school. What she found instead was something more unsettling: the raw documents of a generation being destroyed. The newspapers, largely written by teenage boys, recorded the deaths of their slightly older friends and brothers in a language of extraordinary patriotism that curdled as the war progressed. The “In Memoriam” sections, with their obituaries of alumni killed in the trenches, became the emotional engine of the novel.
The protagonists Henry Gaunt and Sidney Ellwood were inspired by her reading of and about Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon respectively. She began writing In Memoriam in 2019 and it was published by Knopf in the United States and Viking in the United Kingdom in March 2023. The book became an international bestseller, a Sunday Times Top Five bestseller in the UK, and a best book of the year at The New Yorker, NPR, and The Washington Post.
Winn lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband Chris Turner, a British and American comedian, and their daughter.
Writing Style and Approach
Winn writes with an unusual combination of propulsive narrative pace and literary precision. In Memoriam moves quickly; it is, in structure, closer to a page-turner than many serious literary novels about war. But the prose is carefully controlled, the emotional beats precisely judged, and the period detail thoroughly researched.
She is particularly interested in the gap between how events are described publicly and how they are experienced privately. The school newspapers that inspired the novel offered one register; the lived reality of the trenches offered another. Her novel lives in that space between official language and private suffering.
Her treatment of the romance between Gaunt and Ellwood is tender and restrained, which makes its moments of realisation more powerful. She does not soften the war. The novel’s combination of beauty and brutality, as multiple reviewers noted, is precisely the point: these things happened to the same people, at the same time, and understanding both is necessary.
In Memoriam (2023)
Setting: An English boarding school, then the Western Front, 1914-1918.
Summary: It is 1914, and the war feels distant to Henry Gaunt, Sidney Ellwood, and their classmates at an idyllic English boarding school. The school newspaper reports the heroic deaths of former pupils with a language of patriotism that makes the war seem exciting, even romantic. But Gaunt has a private burden: an overwhelming, unspoken love for his best friend Ellwood, who is in love with him and doesn’t know it.
When Gaunt’s mother asks him to enlist to protect the family from anti-German hostility (his father was German), he is partly relieved. The trenches offer an escape from feelings he cannot face. Ellwood and their classmates follow. What happens on the Western Front to these boys who grew up reading Tennyson and believing in honour is the heart of the novel.
Winn structures the story with school newspaper excerpts, letters, and the lists of the wounded and the dead. The device of the In Memoriam columns, the school’s own official record of its losses, gives the book its title and its method: this is a novel about how we choose to remember, and what those records leave out.
In Memoriam is a love story that is also a war novel that is also an elegy. It drew comparisons to Pat Barker’s Regeneration Trilogy, Sebastian Faulks’s Birdsong, and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. Reviewers praised its pacing, its emotional control, and its refusal to let either the romance or the horror of war overshadow the other.
Awards and Recognition
- Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize (2023)
- Waterstones Novel of the Year (2023)
- British Book Awards Debut Book of the Year (2023)
- VCU Cabell First Novelist Award (2024)
- Longlisted for the Center for Fiction Debut Novel Prize
- Named a best book of the year by The New Yorker, NPR, and The Washington Post
- Sunday Times Top Five bestseller (UK)
- GMA Buzz Pick (US)
Writing Schedule and Upcoming Books
No second novel has been announced as of early 2026. Check Winn’s website at alicewinn.com for updates.
Similar Authors You’ll Enjoy
If In Memoriam moved you, these authors offer related pleasures:
- Sebastian Faulks — Birdsong is the book to which In Memoriam is most often compared. Faulks’s WWI novel covers similar terrain with similar seriousness and emotional depth. The comparison is entirely merited; read them together.
- Pat Barker — The Regeneration Trilogy covers the psychological and emotional cost of WWI with the same unflinching honesty. Barker is the more established figure in this literary tradition; Winn is the successor.
- Kate Quinn — Quinn’s historical fiction, particularly The Alice Network, deals with wartime courage and its aftermath with Winn’s combination of pace and emotional weight.
- Madeline Miller — Miller’s The Song of Achilles, another novel about male love set against a backdrop of total war, draws a natural comparison with In Memoriam. Both make ancient or historical contexts feel immediate and personal.
- Ken Follett — Fall of Giants covers WWI on an epic scale across multiple countries. For readers wanting a broader canvas after In Memoriam‘s intensity, Follett is a natural next step.
- Giles Kristian — Kristian’s novel Camelot, and his more recent The Edge of the Blade, show the same commitment to inhabiting extreme historical experience that characterises Winn’s approach.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is In Memoriam about?
In Memoriam is a love story between two young men, Henry Gaunt and Sidney Ellwood, set during World War I. It begins at their English boarding school in 1914 and moves to the Western Front as they enlist and experience the trenches. The novel is both a war story and a romance, and refuses to soften either element.
Is In Memoriam really comparable to Birdsong?
The comparison was made by multiple reviewers and is justified, though the books are different in structure and in the specifics of their approach. Both are serious literary novels about WWI on the Western Front, both combine a love story with a war narrative, and both take the emotional and physical experience of the trenches seriously. Winn’s novel is faster-paced and shorter; Faulks’s is more expansive. Readers who love one tend to love the other.
Is In Memoriam historically accurate?
Winn conducted thorough research, including reading the actual student newspapers from Marlborough College from 1913 to 1919. The school newspaper device in the novel draws directly from those archives. Her broader depiction of the Western Front and the experience of young officers in the trenches is well researched. The central characters are fictional, though they were inspired by real figures: Gaunt by Robert Graves, Ellwood by Siegfried Sassoon.
Is In Memoriam appropriate for younger readers?
The novel contains graphic descriptions of trench warfare and a same-sex romance. It is not suitable for younger children. It is appropriate for older teenagers and adults. Many schools use it in sixth form and equivalent courses. Parents should be aware of both the war violence and the romantic content.
Will Alice Winn write more historical fiction?
No second novel has been announced as of early 2026. Given the scale of the success of In Memoriam and Winn’s stated ambition as a novelist, a second book is expected but unconfirmed. She has also worked as a screenwriter, so other projects may be in development.
How long does it take to read In Memoriam?
In Memoriam is approximately 400 pages. At an average adult reading pace it takes around eight to ten hours. It is the kind of novel readers tend to read quickly because the pacing compels it; many report finishing in two or three sittings.
What makes In Memoriam different from other WWI novels?
The central same-sex romance gives the novel a perspective that differs from most WWI fiction. Winn is also unusually interested in the language of how the war was recorded and communicated: the school newspapers, the official obituaries, the letters between characters. The novel is partly about the gap between public narrative and private experience in wartime. The boarding school setting, which grounds the characters’ friendship before the war, gives the transition to the trenches an additional emotional weight.
Where does Alice Winn fit in the tradition of WWI fiction?
Winn’s reviewers consistently placed her in the company of Pat Barker, Sebastian Faulks, and Wilfred Owen. Her novel draws on the tradition of war poetry as well as war fiction; Tennyson’s In Memoriam A.H.H., from which the title comes, is referenced throughout. She has extended that tradition by placing a same-sex romance at its centre, which is both a literary innovation and a historical claim: men like Gaunt and Ellwood existed, and the war killed them too.
Conclusion
Alice Winn has done something rare with her debut novel: she has written a book that belongs immediately in the conversation with the great WWI literary works, and she has done it on her first published attempt. In Memoriam is devastating and beautiful in equal measure, and its central love story gives the war’s horror an additional dimension that makes the human cost feel new even for readers who have read widely in this period.
She is, in every sense, a writer to watch. One novel is all she has published so far, and it is already one of the most significant pieces of WWI historical fiction of the past decade.
Start with In Memoriam. There is nothing else to read yet, but that one book is more than enough.
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