Taylor, Seabrook and Charlesworth shortlisted for the TLS Ackerley Prize

Books by Catherine Taylor, Jeremy Seabrook and Monique Charlesworth have been shortlisted for the TLS Ackerley Prize 2024 for memoir and autobiography.

Taylor’s The Stirrings (W&N) is up against Seabrook’s Private Worlds (Pluto Press) and Charlesworth’s Mother Country (Moth Books). The judges said they “describe the difficulties of growing up, secrets within families, and finding one’s place in the world.”

Hailed as a “compelling detective story and an unusual and highly original book”, Charlesworth’s Mother Country travels back and forth in time, and to many places – Nazi Germany, wartime Morocco and Brussels, post-war Birkenhead and present-day Paris – in an attempt to unravel the hidden past of the author’s secretive mother.

Seabrook’s Private Worlds is described as “a wonderfully detailed account of working-class life in Northampton” at a time when homosexuality was a crime and Taylor’s The Stirrings describes growing up in Sheffield in the 1970s and 1980s with “great vividness and a complete lack of sentimentality", the judges said.

The winner of the prize will be announced at an event featuring the shortlisted authors in conversation with the chair of the judges, biographer and cartographer Peter Parker, in London on 25th July 2024. Tickets can be found here.

The Ackerley Prize was established in 1982 in memory of J R Ackerley (1896–1967), the author and long-time literary editor of the Listener magazine. It is awarded annually to a literary autobiography of outstanding merit, by an author of British nationality, and published in the UK in the previous year. It is now awarded in partnership with the Times Literary Supplement (TLS) and has been renamed the TLS Ackerley Prize.

Recent winners include Nancy Campbell, Frances Stonor Saunders, Claire Wilcox and Alison Light, while among the past winners are Alan Bennett, Michael Frayn, John Osborne, Jenni Diski, Germaine Greer, Blake Morrison and Sonali Deraniyagala. 

The prize is judged by Parker, the biographer and critic Claire Harman, and the writer and editor Michael Caines.The winner receives £4,000. The judges called in 35 autobiographies and memoirs published in 2023, and these were gradually whittled down to six possible contenders for the prize.