Wild Twin

"This autobiography-focused prize can be relied upon to highlight some of the most interesting new memoirs being published in the UK. This year, the winner was Jeff Young’s Wild Twin — also shortlisted for the 2025 Stanfords Travel Book of the Year prize —which offers an account of the author’s years as a drifter, intertwined with reflections from the present day. It is at once, noted judge Peter Parker, “a ruefully funny account of a young Liverpudlian’s dreams of pursuing the life of a poète maudit in Europe and a moving meditation on how lives are built upon our memories and unravel without them. Jeff Young’s description of his time in Amsterdam in the early 1980s brilliantly evokes the hand-to-mouth existence of life on the margins, living in squats, pilfering goods, cleaning hotels and working in seedy bars. Almost half a century later he is back in Liverpool, where both his mother and one of his sisters have died and his father is drifting into the fog of Alzheimer’s.” Wild Twin, they concluded, “is a wonderfully original and beautifully written autobiography.” December 22, 2025 Five Books aims to keep its book recommendations and interviews up to date. If you are the interviewee and would like to update your choice of books (or even just what you say about them) please email us at [email protected] Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you've enjoyed this interview, please support us by donating a small amount ."

"Yes, this was one of my strong favourites. It’s really a unique book. It’s about how the author, as a young man in the 1970s, drops out of his life in Liverpool and hitchhikes to Paris in search of a version of himself, which he calls ‘Wild Twin’: a shadow boy or feral drifter. He goes into this strange kind of fugue, rough sleeping, getting lost, living in slummy squats. There’s music and drugs. He lives in the red light district in Amsterdam. It’s a wonderful, kaleidoscopic, almost hallucinatory book, which really transports you to a place and a moment in time. You can feel it and smell it and see it. But it’s also reaching for the universal themes of literature: the folly and passions and anxiety of youth, and the longing and reflection of older age. The latter part of the book is about him coming home, and his father’s slow decline. I thought it was terrific. Truly original. It has a great deal of ingenuity in it. Yes, and I’m sure that several of these writers don’t even think of their books as travel books. But I think that’s rather good. I’m glad that Stanfords is allowing this wide interpretation. Because travel writing does collide with memoir and place writing, these things aren’t mutually exclusive, and that’s why it’s such an exciting field—and becoming more exciting again. It had a heyday in the 1980s and 1990s and now it’s coming back strongly as this hybrid genre."