Ross Perlin wins the £25k British Academy Prize for his book on endangered languages

American author Ross Perlin has won the £25,000 British Academy Book Prize for Global Cultural Understanding for Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues (Grove Press).

Chair of judges, professor Charles Tripp FBA, announced the winner at a celebration at the British Academy on Tuesday evening (22nd October).

Perlin is a linguist and co-director of the Manhattan-based non-profit Endangered Language Alliance, an organisation dedicated to documenting endangered languages and supporting linguistic diversity.

In Language City, Perlin “writes engagingly of the history of migration into New York and of the languages and cultures that came to the city, overwhelming the Lenape speakers who were the original inhabitants of the territory”, prize organisers said. “He brings this linguistic mix alive in the present by following the personal stories of six remarkable speakers of endangered languages to fully understand the resilience of their communities and the richness of their languages. Language City is not only a story about New York City, but about all great metropolises. It is one that has global resonance.”

The New York-based author also wrote Intern Nation: How to Earn Nothing and Learn Little in the Brave New Economy (Verso Books) about unpaid work and youth economics. He has written for the New York Times, Guardian, Harper’s and the literary magazine n+1.

Commenting on behalf of the judges, professor Tripp said: “Language City is a fascinating, captivating social history and contemporary linguistic account of New York City. It offers readers a unique perspective of the city that brings out both the precarity, but also the resilience of migrants and their rich and varied languages as they seek to adapt their native tongues to 21st-century urban life.

"At a time when many languages worldwide are disappearing, Ross Perlin celebrates the subtleties of linguistic diversity, treating each with sensitivity and humanity."

Professor Julia Black, president of the British Academy, added: “Language City is a beautifully crafted social history and a stark reminder of the human connection that languages enable. We believe that a linguistically diverse society benefits everyone, and this book demonstrates that perfectly.”

Each of the shortlisted writers will receive £1,000. Other contenders included Material World: A Substantial Story of Our Past and Future (Ebury) by Ed Conway; Smoke and Ashes: Opium’s Hidden Histories (John Murray) by Amitav Ghosh; The Secret Lives of Numbers: A Global History of Mathematics & Its Unsung Trailblazers (Penguin Books) by Kate Kitagawa and Timothy Revell; The Tame and the Wild: People and Animals after 1492 (Harvard University Press) by Marcy Norton; and Divided: Racism, Medicine and Why We Need to Decolonise Healthcare (Profile Books) by Annabel Sowemimo.

The shortlist was selected from 263 submissions published between 1st April 2023 and 31th March 2024.

Tripp was joined on the 2024 judging panel by Rebecca Earle, food historian and professor of history at the University of Warwick, along with the former BBC foreign correspondent Bridget Kendall Hon, journalist and broadcaster Ritula Shah as well as Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad FBA, professor of comparative religion and philosophy at Lancaster University.

The award was established in 2013 to reward and celebrate the best works of non-fiction that demonstrate rigour and originality and have contributed to public understanding of world cultures and their interaction. The international prize is open to authors of any nationality.

The winner in 2023 was Nandini Das for Courting India: England, Mughal India and the Origins of Empire (Bloomsbury).