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