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Soni wins £25k Ideas Prize and Profile books deal
The Ideas Prize for non-fiction has been awarded to Cambridge academic Siddharth Soni for his proposal Monstrous Archives.
Soni is the third winner of The Ideas Prize, which awards a £25,000 publishing deal with Profile Books for a first trade book proposal by an academic.
Soni is the Isaac Newton Trust Fellow at the University of Cambridge, where he is based within Cambridge Digital Humanities (CDH). His research spans digital and computational humanities, post-colonial literature and critical archive studies. He also teaches modern and contemporary literature at the English faculty.
His winning proposal, Monstrous Archives, charts the evolution of the archive in the age of information technology. It excavates the colonial and military histories behind archival technologies and reflects on the ways they shape how we record and revisit the past.
Soni said: “One might think of the archive today as not any single physical repository, but a large and inscrutable monster winding beneath our oceans, plugged into a planetary grid of data farms, undersea cables and satellite systems. In this book I want to explore these shifts. The Ideas Prize is an incredible affirmation of my work, and I am delighted to call Profile Books my literary home.”
Professor of zoology and author of numerous popular science books Matthew Cobb, who sat on this year’s judging panel, said: “Monstrous Archives is an exciting, utterly novel way of thinking about archives and databases. It promises to be a game-changing book, and Siddharth Soni brings a fresh new voice to non-fiction writing.”
London Review of Books editor Joanne O’Leary, who also sat on the judging panel alongside Cobb, Aitken Alexander’s Chris Wellbelove and Profile Books’ Izzy Everington, said: “From card catalogues, to colonial libraries, to data centres, this paradigm-shifting book promises to change how we think about archives and the ideologies behind them. Written with flair and verve, Monstrous Archives is the love child of Borges and ChatGPT.”
Profile Books will publish the prize’s previous winner, Paths on the Ocean by Sarah Caputo, in July 2024. Entries for the prize’s fourth edition are now open. Academics or PhD-holders who have never published a trade book before are invited to submit a 3,000 to 4,000-word pitch for their trade début to ideasprize@profilebooks.com. The submission window for entries runs from 8th June to 31st October 2023. Further details and terms and conditions can be found here.
