Ashani Lewis

Ashani Lewis is a British novelist born in London in the late 1990s. She studied at the University of Exeter. Winter Animals (2024, Dialogue Books) is her debut novel, following thirty-eight-year-old Elen who, newly estranged from her husband, falls in with a group of wealthy squatters in an abandoned country estate and is forced to confront the dark secret that binds them together. Winter Animals won the Betty Trask Prize in 2025 — the Society of Authors' annual award for debut novels by Commonwealth authors under 35 — and also won the Somerset Maugham Award in the same year, making Lewis the only author to win both prizes in a single year. Judges praised the novel's combination of psychological suspense, lyrical prose, and social observation. Lewis is one of the most celebrated debut novelists to emerge in British fiction in 2025. Her work has been compared to Sarah Waters for its atmospheric intensity and to Tana French for its genre-literary hybridity.