Catherine Taylor scoops the £4k TLS Ackerley Prize

Journalist and author Catherine Taylor has won the TLS Ackerley Prize 2024 for The Stirrings: A Memoir in Northern Time (Weidenfeld & Nicolson).

The £4,000 award is the UK’s only literary prize dedicated to memoir and autobiography. 

The other two shortlisted books were Monique Charlesworth’s Mother Country (Moth Books) and Jeremy Seabrook’s Private Worlds (Pluto Press).

The 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 (TLS).

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. It was 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.

Taylor told The Bookseller: "In winning the Ackerley prize I’m delighted to follow in the footsteps of iconic writers such as Lorna Sage and Blake Morrison. Memoir is a slippery fish, complex and mysterious. There are so many different ways of interpreting personal experiences, and with The Stirrings I hoped to capture in prose the often elusive times, places and feelings that, though long past, are as vital to me as they were decades ago."

The Stirrings was described by prize organisers as “a frank and furious account of the author’s political and sexual awakening, set largely in Sheffield in the 1970s and 1980s”.

They added: “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.”