Nuseibeh, Atlanta and McIntosh win 2022 Giles St Aubyn Awards

Nuzha Nuseibeh, Ellen Atlanta and Malachi McIntosh have been named as winners of the 2022 RSL Giles St Aubyn Awards, which celebrate non-fiction writing.

Established in 2017, the prize supports writers on their first commissioned works. This year’s judging panel includes Homi K Bhahba, Fiona St Aubyn and Violet Moller, and were announced in a series videos produced for the Royal Society of Literature by illustrator and animator PeiHsin Cho.

Nuseibeh won £10,000 for Namesake (Canongate, 2023), a "lively and learned" examination of her namesake, connecting modern ideas of Islam with myth-making, identity, religion and nationhood, feminism and race, early Muslim history and contemporary Britain.

Nuseibeh is a British-Palestinian doctoral student at Oxford University, born and raised in East Jerusalem. She has previously written for the Atlantic, and been shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize.

"I am immensely honoured and so very grateful to have been awarded the RSL Giles St Aubyn Award - and, to be quite honest, completely stunned," she said. "Writing a first book is a daunting and overwhelming process, and so it means the world to me to be recognised in this way, especially by such a prestigious institution."

Meanwhile, Atlanta was awarded £5,000 for Pixel Flesh: Modern Beauty Culture and The Women It Harms (Headline, 2023).

Pixel Flesh explores women’s relationship to beauty and digital feminism through conversation and intimate observation, and represents a refusal to brush the issues facing young women under the carpet.

Judge St Aubyn said of the book: "This is an important book, written at a time when the beauty industry has an exponential influence on the internet through celebrity endorsements and apps such as Instagram. With a unique insight that is both personal and professional, Atlanta shows how the industry controls and shapes the way women see themselves today."

McIntosh, associate professor of World Literatures in English at the University of Oxford, received £2,500 for Revolutionary Consciousness: Black Britain, Black Power, and the Caribbean Artists Movement (Faber, 2025). 

On receiving the award, he said: "I’m increasingly excited about the scope and potential of this project, and it’s truly a delight to see that excitement reflected in others and take the form of institutional support. I hugely admire the work and fellows of the RSL and to have A Revolutionary Consciousness endorsed by the organisation in this way is both a spur to put my all in it and a concrete means to widen the book’s scope. I’m extremely thankful."