Few prizes for young authors can boast quite such a track record as the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year award. Since its inception in 1991, the prize has proved an unfailingly reliable guide to youthful literary endeavour, spotting early a bevy of talented writers who have gone on to become significant literary figures. In 1991, Helen Simpson was chosen as the prize’s first recipient; today, she is one of the finest short-story writers in the country. In 1993, it was the turn of the poet Simon Armitage; in 1994, William Dalrymple, the travel writer and historian, was chosen; in 2000, it was Sarah Waters and, in 2001, it was fellow Man Booker-short-listed novelist Zadie Smith.

This year’s shortlist for the award, which is open to British writers under 35, is one of the strongest yet and features four writers — Naomi Alderman, Horatio Clare, Rory Stewart and John Stubbs — of striking literary accomplishments.

Alderman, the only novelist in the field, has set her debut, Disobedience (Penguin £7.99), in a milieu she knows intimately, the Orthodox Jewish community in Hendon. The novel recounts the upheavals that ensue when Ronit, a rabbi’s daughter who has escaped pious north London for worldly New York, returns home for her father’s funeral. Alderman deftly and humorously lifts the lid on an enclosed community, which she depicts with insight and compassion. “There is wonder in the plotting,” wrote Sophie Harrison in The Sunday Times, “but the real wonder is Alderman’s capacity for original thinking.”

Family life also looms large in Horatio Clare’s beautifully observed memoir, Running for the Hills (J Murray £7.99), a book that John Carey called “heartening, raw, tender, radiant”. The poignant story of how Clare’s parents fled city life in 1970 for a supposed rural idyll on a remote Welsh farm, the book charts with a remarkable lack of sentiment the dashing of their romantic notions as the unforgiving realities of hill farming tear the family apart.

A bracing mix of reportage, travelogue and memoir, Rory Stewart’s Occupational Hazards: My Time Governing in Iraq (Picador £17.99) was hailed by Simon Jenkins on publication last June as “devastating”. Chronicling an extraordinary year in Stewart’s life as the young administrator struggled to bring peace and democracy to the Marsh Arabs after the Iraq war, the book manages to offer a devastating critique of a failed policy while also being strikingly well written.

Literary stylishness is also a feature of John Stubbs’s richly textured biography, John Dunne: The Reformed Soul (Viking £25). A young Cambridge don who has been intrigued by the metaphysical poet since he was a schoolboy, Stubbs brings to his book an addictive enthusiasm. As Miranda Seymour commented in these pages, the book is “fluent, assured and on fire with ideas”.

The judges this year are Susannah Herbert (Sunday Times literary editor), Andrew Holgate (deputy literary editor) and Peter Kemp (fiction editor). We will be announcing the winner, and handing over the £5,000 cheque, at a special lunch at the Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival on Sunday, March 25.

Previous winners of the award

1991 Helen Simpson (Four Bare Legs in a Bed)

1992 Caryl Phillips (Cambridge)

1993 Simon Armitage (Kid)

1994 William Dalrymple (City of Djinns)

1995 Andrew Cowan (Pig) 1996 Katherine Pierpoint (Truffle Beds)

1997 Francis Spufford (I May Be Some Time)

1998 Patrick French (Liberty or Death)

1999 Paul Farley (The Boy from the Chemist Is Here to See You)

2000 Sarah Waters (Affinity)

2001 Zadie Smith (White Teeth)

2003 William Fiennes (The Snow Geese)

2004 Robert Macfarlane (Mountains of the Mind)

No award was made in 2002, 2005 and 2006

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