23 July 2026

For immediate release

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Geoff Dyer wins the TLS Ackerley Prize 2026

for Homework

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We are delighted to announce that Geoff Dyer has won the TLS Ackerley Prize 2026 for Homework (Canongate)

 

The other two shortlisted books were Joe Dunthorne’s Children of Radium (Hamish Hamilton) and Charlotte Northall’s Practicing Dying (Pilot Press)

The TLS Ackerley Prize is the UK’s only literary prize dedicated to memoir and autobiography
 

The winner of the prize was announced at a special event featuring the shortlisted authors in conversation with the Chair of the judges, Peter Parker, at Foyles, Charing Cross Road on Thursday 23 July.

 

The Ackerley Prize was established 44 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. 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. 

 

Peter Parker, Chair of the Judges, said:
 

From the thirty-one books we called in for consideration this year, we ended up with a shortlist of three very different titles, all distinguished by the sheer quality of the writing. We hope that people will be encouraged to buy and read all three books, but the winner of the TLS Ackerley Prize 2026 is Geoff Dyer’s Homework. 

 

Homework is a meticulous and absorbing account of growing up in a Britain still feeling the after-effects of the Second World War and rationing. The only child of a retiring school dinner lady and a sheet-metal worker whose obsessive economic prudence circumscribed family life, Dyer was brought up in a suburb of Cheltenham. In an astonishing feat of recollection and reconstruction, he describes his life in the 1960s and 1970s with a sharp attention to detail. We follow him to school, and hear about the crazes and hobbies that absorbed him in his free time, his pursuit of sexual experience, and his eventual rebellion against parental values. While the book tells a highly individual story, about the forming of the author’s character and how his parents’ lives turn out to be more complex than they first appear, it also vividly evokes what it is like to grow through childhood and adolescence, and captures an entire period of English social history. Funny, forthright and beautifully written, this is a memoir that evokes the texture of ordinary lives to show just how extraordinary they really are.

 

The Ackerley Prize was first awarded in 1982. It was established in memory of J.R. 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 Jeff Young, Catherine Taylor, Frances Stonor Saunders, Claire Wilcox, Alison Light, Yrsa Daley-Ward, Richard Beard, Alice Jolly, Sonali Deraniyagala, Duncan Fallowell, Miranda Seymour, Michael Frayn, Lorna Sage, Alan Bennett, Blake Morrison, Barry Humphries 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.