Michael Kiwanuka

The Mercury Prize is the one that matters most, and it is worth remembering how he won it. In 2020 the shortlist included Dua Lipa's Future Nostalgia, Charli XCX's How I'm Feeling Now and Stormzy's Heavy Is the Head, three of the biggest records of that year, and the judges went with a self-titled third album by a soul singer from Muswell Hill. Eight years earlier he had won the BBC Sound of 2012 poll, a vote that had previously flagged Adele and Jessie J. Winning both ends of that arc, the newcomer prize and then the career prize, puts him in a small group of British artists.