J.R. Ackerley
The TLS Ackerley Prize
The TLS Ackerley Prize is awarded each year to a volume of autobiography by a British author. It was founded in 1982 in memory of the writer and editor J.R. Ackerley. Originally endowed by his sister Nancy West, it is now funded by the royalties received for Ackerley’s books, and remains the only British prize for autobiography.
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The judges do not accept submissions by publishers but call in books themselves, and are looking for ones that display the high standards Ackerley himself set in My Dog Tulip and My Father and Myself - enquiring, absolutely candid and, above all, very well written.
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The judges are the Trustees of J.R. Ackerley Memorial Trust are all themselves writers, currently Ackerley’s biographer, Peter Parker (chair); biographer and critic Claire Harman and the writer and editor Michael Caines. Former judges include the novelist Francis King, the biographer Michael Holroyd, the editor of Ackerley’s letters, Neville Braybrooke, food writer and historian Colin Spencer, the biographer and historian Richard Davenport-Hines and the novelist and short story writer Georgina Hammick.
Press Release
25 July 2024
For immediate release
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Catherine Taylor wins the TLS AckerleyPrize 2024
for The Stirrings
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We are delighted to announce that Catherine Taylor has won
the TLS Ackerley Prize 2024 for The Stirrings: A Memoir in Northern Time (Weidenfeld & Nicolson). The other two shortlisted books were Monique Charlesworth’s Mother Country (Moth Books) and Jeremy Seabrook’s Private Worlds (Pluto Press)
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The TLS Ackerley Prize is the UK’s only literary prize dedicated to memoir and autobiography
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The winner of the prize, now in its 42nd year, was announced at a special event featuring the shortlisted authors in conversation with the Chair of the judges, Peter Parker, at Reference-Point on Thursday 25 July.
The Ackerley Prize was established 42 years ago in memory of Joe Randolph Ackerley (1896–1967), the author and long-time literary editor of The Listener magazine, and is now awarded in partnership with the Times Literary Supplement.
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The prize is given annually to a literary autobiography of outstanding merit, written by an author of British nationality, and published in the UK in the previous year.
The TLS Ackerley Prize is judged by biographer and historian Peter Parker (Chair), writer and editor Michael Caines, and writer and critic Claire Harman. The winner receives a cheque for £4,000.
Catherine Taylor, winner of the TLS Ackerley Prize 2024, said:
"I’ve never won anything, actually, so I’m really pleased. It’s an amazing pedigree, the Ackerley Prize, and I am following in the footsteps of Lorna Sage and Blake Morrison, for example, who are two of my favourite 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."
Peter Parker, Chair of the Judges, said:
"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.
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The Stirrings is a frank and furious account of the author’s political and sexual awakening, set largely in Sheffield in the 1970s and 1980s. This was the period of Britain’s industrial decline, the murders of the Yorkshire Ripper, Greenham Common, the threat of nuclear war and the Miners’ Strike, and against this backdrop Catherine Taylor describes the break-up of her family, the onset of serious illness, the death of a close friend, and the dangers to which young women are routinely exposed. The past is brilliantly evoked by an accumulation of precise and minutely observed details of the everyday things that shape adolescent lives– particularly clothes, food, drink and music. Rarely does a book convey so viscerally, unsentimentally and with such dark humour, the exhilarating and terrifying experience of being young.
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The Ackerley Prize was first awarded in 1982. It was established in memory of Joe Randolph Ackerley, author of the classic autobiography My Father and Myself and long-time literary editor of The Listener, by his sister Nancy West.
Ackerley’s posthumous royalties continue to provide capital for the prize. The winner receives a cheque for £4,000.
Previous winners have included Frances Stonor Saunders, Claire Wilcox, Alison Light, Yrsa Daley-Ward, Richard Beard, Amy Liptrot, Alice Jolly, Sonali Deraniyagala, Duncan Fallowell, Miranda Seymour, Michael Frayn, Lorna Sage, Alan Bennett, Blake Morrison, Germaine Greer and John Osborne. A full list of past winners and further details about Ackerley’s life and work can be found at www.jrackerley.com.
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For other enquiries please use the contact form or write to ackerleyprize@gmail.com
Winners of the TLS Ackerley Prize
The Stirrings
Catherine Taylor
Weidenfeld & Nicolson 2024
Patch Work
Claire Wilcox
Bloomsbury 2021
The Day That Went Missing
Richard Beard
Harvill Secker 2018
Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death and Brain Surgery
Henry Marsh
Weidnfeld & Nicolson 2015
How to Disappear
Duncan Fallowell
Ditto Press 2012
The Three of Us
Julia Blackburn
Vintage 2009
Untold Stories
Alan Bennett
Faber & Faber 2006
Stranger on a Train
Jenny Diski
Virago 2003
Child of My Time
Mark Frankland
Sinclair-Stevenson 2000
The Scent of Dried Roses
Tim Lott
Penguin Classics 1997
And When Did You Last See Your Father?
Blake Morrison
Granta Books 1994
St Martin's Ride
Paul Binding
Secker & Warburg 1991
Little Wilson & Big God
Anthony Burgess
Penguin Books Ltd 1988
Deceived with Kindness
Angelica Garnett
Harcourt 1985
High Path
Ted Walker
Joint winner
Routledge & Kegan Paul 1983
Thunderstone
Nancy Campbell
Elliott & Thompson 2023
A Radical Romance
Alison Light
Fig Tree 2020
The Outrun
Amy Liptrot
Canongate 2017
Wave
Sonali Deraniyagla
Virago 2014
My Father's Fortune
Michael Frayn
Faber & Faber 2011
In My Father's House
Miranda Seymour
Simon & Schuster 2008
Half An Arch
Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy
Timewell Press 2005
Out of India: a Raj Childhood
Michael Foss
Michael O'Mara Books 2002
Precious Lives
Margaret Forster
Vintge 1999
The Railway Man
Eric Lomax
Vintage 1996
More, Please
Barry Humphries
Viking 1993
Daddy We Hardly Knew You
Germaine Greer
Randon House USA Inc 1990
After a Funeral
Diana Athill
Hamish Hamilton 1987
Still Life – Sketches from a Tunbridge Wells Childhood
Richard Cobb
Chatto & Windus 1984
Shaky Relations
Edward Blishen
David & Charles 1982
The Suitcase
Frances Stonor Saunders
Jonathan Cape 2022
The Terrible
Yrsa Daley-Ward
Penguin Books 2019
Dead Babies and Seaside Towns
Alice Jolly
Unbound 2016
Leaving Alexandria: A Memoir of Faith and Doubt
Richard Holloway
Canongate Books 2013
Direct Red
Gabriel Weston
Cape 2010
Keeping Mum
Brian Thompson
Atlantic Books 2007
Clouds of Glory-A Hoxton Childhood
Bryan Magee
Jonathan Cape 2004
Bad Blood
Lorna Sage
4th Estate 2001
True to Both My Selves
Katrin FitzHerbert
Virago 1998
Something in Linoleum
Paul Vaughan
Sinclair-Stevenson 1995
Almost a Gentleman
John Osborne
Faber & Faber 1992
The Grass Arena
John Healy
Faber & Faber 1989
Time and Time Again
Dan Jacobson
Flamingo 1986
Her People
Kathleen Dayus
Joint winner
Virago 1983