PEN Ackerley Prize goes to Stoner Saunders’ 'riveting' memoir of borders and belonging

Francis Stonor Saunders has been awarded the PEN Ackerley Prize for outstanding memoir and autobiography for The Suitcase: Six Attempts to Cross a Border (Jonathan Cape).

Described by the judges as a “profoundly moving meditation on borders and belonging, nationality and displacement”, it won out against two other shortlisted books, Arifa Akbar’s Consumed: A Sister’s Story (Sceptre) and Roy Watkins’ Simple Annals: A Memoir of Early Childhood (CB Editions).

Saunders was announced as winner of the £3,000 prize, which celebrates its 40th year in 2022, at a an event featuring the shortlisted authors in conversation with the chair of the judges, biographer and historian Peter Parker, at the London Library on 14th July.

Daniel Gorman, director of English PEN, said: “Our congratulations to Frances Stonor Saunders who has won this year’s PEN Ackerley Prize for her captivating memoir tracing her family history across borders. 

“Thank you to all the shortlisted authors for their remarkable works and to the London Library for hosting such a fascinating panel discussion. It’s an honour for us to bestow this prize in the name of writer J R Ackerley, and we are delighted to celebrate his memory as we mark 40 years of the Ackerley Prize.”

The PEN Ackerley Prize was first awarded in 1982, established in memory of Joe Randolph Ackerley, long-time editor of the Listener,  by his sister Nancy. Ackerley’s posthumous royalties continue to provide capital for the prize. Last year’s winner was Claire Wilcox for Patch Work: A Life Amongst Clothes (Bloomsbury). 

Parker added: “The books on this year’s shortlist took us to many different places and covered a long period of time, but they are all concerned with relationships within families. 

“Arifa Akbar describes the catastrophic effects of alienation and cultural dislocation on a family that moved from Lahore to London in the 1970s; Frances Stonor Saunders traced her father’s long journey as a boy escaping Bucharest during the Second World War to become a refugee in Turkey, Egypt, South Africa; and Roy Watkins transports us back to a vividly realised working-class childhood in Lancashire during the 1940s and ‘50s. 

“Though these books are very different in their approach to the art and craft of autobiography, they are all distinguished by the sheer quality of their writing and storytelling. By shortlisting them, we hope to encourage people to buy and read all three books, but the winner of this year’s PEN Ackerley Prize is Frances Stonor Saunders’ The Suitcase.

“Skilfully interweaving history and memoir, Stonor Saunders sets out in her outstandingly well-written book to discover more about the life of a father who had always seemed remote even before he slipped unreachably into the remote hinterland of Alzheimer’s. The Suitcase is not only a riveting and elegantly constructed detective story, but is a subtle and profoundly moving meditation on borders and belonging, nationality and displacement, and the far-reaching effects of major historical events upon the lives of individuals caught up in them.”