BPS announces its Book Award winners

The British Psychological Society (BPS) has announced the winners of its Book Awards, which seek to recognise works of excellence in psychological literature.

The winners receive a commemorative certificate and £500 each.

Chief executive of the BPS Sarb Bajwa said: “This year we’ve seen five excellent titles across three categories. The breadth of topics covered by the winners shows the diversity and strength of our discipline, and I’m delighted that we’ve been able to recognise popular science titles which widen the reach of psychology to the public, alongside academic monographs and textbooks.”

The awards were given to two authors in the popular science category, one in the academic monograph category and two in textbooks. The winning titles range from feminist views in social psychology to the psychology involved when caring for diabetes, and from combating misinformation to the “the transgenerational impact of personal and social trauma”.

Stephen Frosh won in the academic monograph category for Those Who Come After: Postmemory, Acknowledgement and Forgiveness (Palgrave Macmillan).

He said his book “explores the legacies of suffering in relation to ‘those who come after’ – the descendants of victims, survivors and perpetrators of terrible events".

Ben Alderson-Day and Sander Van Der Linden both won in the popular science category. Alderson-Day’s Presence (Manchester University Press) explores the universal, disturbing sense that someone or something is there when we are alone. It is a journey using cutting-edge research in contemporary psychology, psychiatry, neuroscience and philosophy. Meanwhile Van Der Linden’s FOOLPROOF: Why We Fall for Misinformation and How to Build Immunity (Fourth Estate) “aims to help explain why our brains are so susceptible to falsehoods, how and why misinformation spreads in society, and above all, to share insights from our research in a way that empowers citizens around the globe to spot misleading information in daily life".

In the textbook category, Val Wilson won with Psychology in Diabetes Care and Practice (Routledge). The book enables readers to “learn more about how best to manage the condition, reduce psychological distress and improve diabetes self-management". The final winner was A Feminist Companion to Social Psychology (Open University Press), written by Madeleine Pownall and Wendy Stainton Rogers. The book is said to be “like having a feminist friend who sits beside you as you study, somewhat cynical but also a bit giggly, whispering things like ’actually there’s a very different way of looking at that’, and every now and again hissing ’That’s a load of patriarchal clap-trap’.”