Taylor wins 2024 Ackerley Prize

In the UK, journalist and author Catherine Taylor has won the 2024 TLS Ackerley Prize 2024 for The Stirrings (Weidenfeld & Nicolson), reports the Bookseller.

Taylor receives £4000 (A$7852). Also shortlisted for the prize were Mother Country (Monique Charlesworth, Moth Books) and Private Worlds (Jeremy Seabrook, Pluto Press).

The prize, which is the UK’s only literary prize dedicated to memoir and autobiography, was established 42 years ago in memory of Joe Randolph Ackerley, the author and long-time literary editor of the Listener magazine, and is now awarded in partnership with the Times Literary Supplement (TLS). The award is presented annually for a ‘literary autobiography of outstanding merit, written by an author of British nationality, and published in the UK in the previous year’.

Taylor told the Bookseller: ‘In winning the Ackerley prize I’m delighted to follow in the footsteps of iconic writers such as Lorna Sage and Blake Morrison. Memoir is a slippery fish, complex and mysterious. There are so many different ways of interpreting personal experiences, and with The Stirrings I hoped to capture in prose the often elusive times, places and feelings that, though long past, are as vital to me as they were decades ago.’

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