Joseph wins £10,000 RSL Christopher Bland Prize 

Paterson Joseph has won the Royal Society of Literature (RSL) Christopher Bland Prize for The Secret Diaries of Charles Ignatius Sancho (Dialogue).

The £10,000 award celebrates outstanding achievements for a début novelist or non-fiction writer first published aged 50 or over. This is the fifth year of the prize.

Initially a one-man show written and performed by Joseph in 2018, the book illuminates the remarkable life of Charles Ignatius Sancho, British abolitionist, writer and composer, and the first known Black man to cast a vote in England.

Joseph said: “I am happier about receiving the Christopher Bland Prize 2023 than I could have imagined. As a fledgling actor I wanted to be respected by my peers and to be looked upon as ‘one of us’. The granting of this award is more than the equivalent of that, as the work on the page is somehow more personal.

“All my love and much of my life has gone into the creation of The Secret Diaries of Charles Ignatius Sancho and my reward has been this accolade. Sancho would be pleased, if not a little surprised, that his short life has lent itself to such attention 243 years after his passing. We bring him to life a little more every time we remember him in music, image and word. This novel is my small contribution to that remembrance and I hope it leads to many creative echoes of the life of a great Black Briton.”

This year’s judges were Lemn Sissay (chair), Meena Kandasamy and Simon Savidge. Sissay commented: “The Secret Diaries of Charles Ignatius Sancho is historical fiction, bursting with the wit and perspicacity of its protagonist Ignatius Sancho. Paterson Joseph, an actor by trade, is clearly a writer in an actor’s body. Many thespians feel the urge to inhabit the world of a writer, but few can fulfil it to the degree of Paterson Joseph.

“He inhabits characters and scenes as Dickens does, through the character and story. The Secret Diaries leaves the reader frowning at the audacity of history for leaving out such a brilliant character. Equally we are slightly in awe of the author for turning history around.”

Also shortlisted for this year’s prize were Bonnie Garmus’ Lessons in Chemistry (Doubleday), Susie Alegre’s Freedom to Think (Atlantic Books), Jo Browning Wroe’s A Terrible Kindness (Faber & Faber), Jill Nalder’s Love from the Pink Palace (Wildfire) and Devika Ponnambalam’s I Am Not Your Eve (Bluemoose Books).