Taylor, Seabrook and Charlesworth shortlisted for the TLS Ackerley Prize

The prize is evaluated by Parker, the biographer and movie critic Claire Harman, and the writer and editor Michael Caines.The winner receives ₤ 4,000. The judges contacted 35 memoirs and memoirs released in 2023, and these were progressively trimmed to 6 possible challengers for the reward.

The Ackerley Prize was developed in 1982 in memory of J R Ackerley (1896– 1967), the writer and veteran literary editor of the Audience publication. It is granted annually to a literary autobiography of outstanding quality, by an author of British nationality, and released in the UK in the previous year. It is now awarded in partnership with the Times Literary Supplement (TLS) and has actually been relabelled the TLS Ackerley Prize.

Hailed as a “compelling investigator tale and a highly original and uncommon book”, Charlesworth’s Mom Nation travels back and forth in time, and to several locations– Nazi Germany, wartime Morocco and Brussels, post-war Birkenhead and present-day Paris– in an effort to unravel the surprise past of the author’s secretive mom.

Taylor’s The Stirrings (W&N) is up versus Seabrook’s Exclusive Worlds (Pluto Press) and Charlesworth’s Mom Country (Moth Books). The courts said they “define the difficulties of maturing, secrets within family members, and locating one’s location in the world.”

Seabrook’s Personal Worlds is called “an incredibly detailed account of working-class life in Northampton” at a time when homosexuality was a criminal offense and Taylor’s The Stirrings explains growing up in Sheffield in the 1970s and 1980s with “terrific intensity and a full lack of sentimentality”, the judges said.

The champion of the prize will be announced at an event including the shortlisted writers in discussion with the chair of the courts, biographer and cartographer Peter Parker, in London on 25th July 2024. Tickets can be discovered here.