In Sheffield, southern England, the setting of Catherine Taylor’s “The Stirrings”. Image – Getty: SA Khan Photography
By Porter Anderson, Editor in Chief | @Porter_Anderson
A wallet worth £4,000
AS Publish perspectives As readers will recall, the name of the Ackerley Prize has been changed to the TLS Ackerley Prize to reflect the fact that the Prize is now run in partnership with the Literary supplement of the Times and was renamed the TLS Ackerley Prize.
JR Ackerley
The Ackerley Prize focuses on memoirs and autobiographies and was established in 1982 in memory of JAR Ackerley (1896–1967), an author and long-time literary editor of The listener Magazine.
The award is given annually to a literary autobiography by a British author whose work was published in the United Kingdom in the previous year. This awards programme is so compact that it does not have its own website, but is available as a page on the JR Ackerley website.
Jurors for selecting Catherine Taylor for this year’s award – for The emotions (Hachette / Weidenfeld & Nicolson) – were Peter Parker (chair); Claire Harman; and Michael Caines. The judges called on 25 autobiographies and memoirs published in 2023, the program reports, and sorted them initially into a longlist of six and now into a shortlist of three.
In a commentary by Parker as chairman of the jury it says: “Our shortlist this year consisted of three very different, thoroughly engaging, surprisingly candid and beautifully written memoirs. We hope that by drawing attention to these books we will encourage everyone to buy and read all three, but the winner of the TLS Ackerley The 2024 prize goes to Catherine Taylor “The excitement.”
Commenting on winning the £4,000 ($5,177) prize, Taylor said: “I’ve never actually won anything, so I’m really pleased. It’s an amazing lineage that Ackerley Price, and I am following in the footsteps of, for example, Lorna Sage and Blake Morrison, who are two of my favorite authors.
“I won’t say anything more except that my mother probably wouldn’t have wanted me to write the book, but I don’t think she would have been surprised that I wrote it, but I know she would have been proud tonight. Thank you very much.”
Previous winners of this competition 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.
For more information from Publishing Perspectives on international book and publishing awards, see here, more on autobiographies and memoirs here, and more on the UK market here.
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