16 June 2026

For immediate release

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We are delighted to announce the shortlist for the TLS Ackerley Prize 2026 for memoir and autobiography

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Joe Dunthorne, Children of Radium (Hamish Hamilton)

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Geoff Dyer, Homework (Canongate)

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Charlotte Northall, Practicing Dying (Pilot Press)

 

The winner of the Prize will be announced at a special event featuring the shortlisted authors in conversation with thechair of the judges, Peter Parker, at Foyles, 107 Charing Cross Rd, London WC2H 0EB on 23 July 2026 at 7.00pm. 

 

Tickets, to include wine, are £10 General Admission / £8 Foyalty Member and must be booked in advance at:https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/tls-ackerley-prize-event-with-peter-parker-tickets-1991902413740?aff=oddtdtcreator

 

The shortlisted books will be on sale at the event.

 

The Ackerley Prize was established in 1982 in memory of J. R. Ackerley (1896–1967), the author and long-time literaryeditor of The Listener magazine. It is awarded annually to a literary autobiography of outstanding merit by a British author published in the UK in the previous year. It is now awarded in partnership with the Times Literary Supplement and is named the TLS Ackerley Prize.

 

Recent winners include Jeff Young, Catherine Taylor, Nancy Campbell, Frances Stonor Saunders, Claire Wilcox and Alison Light, while among the past winners are Alan Bennett, Michael Frayn, Jenny Diski, Blake Morrison and Sonali Deraniyagala.

The Prize is judged by the biographer and historian Peter Parker (Chair), the biographer and critic Claire Harman, and the writer and editor Michael Caines.

The winner receives a cheque for £4,000.

 

The judges called in thirty-one autobiographies and memoirs published in 2025, and these were gradually whittled down to six possible contenders for the Prize. During a final meeting in June, we reduced these to a shortlist of three outstanding and very different books that take the reader to weapons factories in Nazi Germany and 1930s Turkey, the playgrounds of suburban Cheltenham in the 1960s and ’70s, and a Zen Buddhist monastery in present-day rural France. 

 

Joe Dunthorne’s Children of Radium  investigates a highly unsettling aspect of the author’s  family’s history. His Jewish great grandfather, Siegfried,  not only invented radioactive toothpaste, but also helped to develop poison gases in Germany in the 1930s. Siegfried and his family eventually left Germany for Turkey, apparently fleeing the Nazis, but in his new home Siegfried continued his exploration of the military uses for gas. The family supposedly mounted a daring return to Germany during the Berlin Olympics to collect their belongings, before eventually emigrating to England. Dunthorne travels to Germany and Turkey in an attempt to discover the real truth behind long-standing family stories, many of them recounted in Siegfried’s own long, rambling and evasive memoirs. Armed with a Geiger-counter, he also discovers that Siegfried’s experiments left behind a deadly legacy in the German town where he had his laboratory.  This is a morally complex tale, full of dark ironies and narrative surprises, told with both elegance and a mordant sense of humour. 

 

Geoff Dyer’s Homework  is set in a Britain still feeling the after-effects of the Second World War and rationing. The son of a penny-pinching sheet-metal worker and a school dinner lady, Dyer was brought up in a suburb of Cheltenham and his book is a meticulous, absorbing and often very funny account of his childhood and youth there. To some extent this is any boy’s story of the 1960s and ‘70s, describing in extraordinary and almost sociological detail life at home and at school, how he spent his free time, the kinds of toys he had, the sweets he consumed, and the crazes he pursued. It is also, however, a very individual story, about the forming of the author’s character and how his parents turn out to be far more complex than they first appear. The book not only brings vividly alive what it is like to grow through childhood and adolescence, but also 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.

 

Charlotte Northall’s Practicing Dying is a scarifying and brutally honest account of a young life almost destroyed by addiction and eating disorders. In an attempt to escape a cycle of self-destruction, and feeling failed by the system in Britain which sent her ineffectually in and out of re-hab, the author joins a Zen Buddhist monastery in a French chateau almost as a last resort. She is still extremely ill, consuming large quantities of drugs and alcohol, binge-eating and self-harming, and finds it very difficult to submit to the discipline of the community she has joined. Against the odds, however, she begins to recover, while also suffering numerous relapses, and eventually decides to undergo ango, an intensive three-month training period for monks and nuns. This is a highly original and demanding book with no easy answers or clear resolution. It takes the reader into the very depths of an addict’s experiences as well as describing the more tranquil but nevertheless demanding life inside an isolated religious community devoted to meditation and service.  

 

 

We congratulate the three authors and urge everyone to buy and read these superb memoirs.