In South Yorkshire’s Sheffield, the site of Catherine Taylor’s ‘The Stirrings.’ Image – Getty: SA Khan Photography
By Porter Anderson, Editor-in-Chief | @Porter_Anderson
A Purse of £4,000
As Publishing Perspectives readers will recall, the Ackerley Prize has had its named changed to the TLS Ackerley Prize to reflect the fact that the award now is to be given in partnership with the Times Literary Supplement and has been renamed the TLS Ackerley Prize.
JR Ackerley
Focused on memoir and autobiography, the Ackerley Prize was established in 1982 in memory of JAR Ackerley (1896–1967), an author and longtime literary editor of The Listener magazine.
The honor is given annually to a literary autobiography by British author for a work published in the United Kingdom in the previous year. So compact is this awards program that it has no site of its own, instead standing as a page on the JR Ackerley site.
Jurors for the selection of Catherine Taylor for this year’s prize—for The Stirrings (Hachette / Weidenfeld & Nicolson)—were Peter Parker (chair); Claire Harman; and Michael Caines. The jurors called in 25 autobiographies and memoirs published in 2023, the program reports, sorting them first to a longlist of six and now to a shortlist of three.
In a comment from Parker as jury chair, we read, “Our shortlist this year consisted of three very different, wholly involving, startlingly candid and beautifully written memoirs. We hope that by drawing attention to these books we will encourage everyone to buy and read all three of them, but the winner of the TLS Ackerley Prize 2024 is Catherine Taylor’s The Stirrings.”
In comments on winning the £4,000 award (US$5,177), Taylor says, “I’ve never won anything, actually, so I’m really pleased. It’s an amazing pedigree, the Ackerley Prize, and I’m following in the footsteps of Lorna Sage and Blake Morrison, for example, who are two of my favorite writers.
“I’m not going to say anything else, except that my mother probably wouldn’t have wanted me to write the book, but I think she’d have been not surprised that I wrote it, but I know she’d have been proud this evening. Thank you so much.”
Past winners of this contest include Nancy Campbell, Frances Stonor Saunders, Claire Wilcox, Alison Light, Alan Bennett, Michael Frayn, John Osborne, Jenni Diski, Germaine Greer, Blake Morrison, and Sonali Deraniyagala.
More from Publishing Perspectives on international book and publishing prizes is here, more on autobiography and memoir is here, and more on the United Kingdom’s market is here.