PEN Ackerley Prize

Home > Prizes > PEN Ackerley Prize

The PEN Ackerley Prize is awarded in J R Ackerley’s memory for a literary autobiography of excellence.

The prize was first awarded in 1982. Following the death of Joe Randolph Ackerley (1896 – 1967), author and long-time literary editor of The Listener magazine, his sister Nancy endowed a literary prize in his memory.

Ackerley’s posthumous royalties continue to provide capital for this award.

A longlist of eligible books is nominated by the judges, who are the Trustees of the fund set up for this purpose.

The award is given to a literary autobiography of excellence, written by an author of British nationality and published during the preceding year, for which it is felt that J.R. Ackerley would have expressed enthusiasm.

Read more about Ackerley’s life and work at www.jrackerley.com

Image credit: The Estate of J.R. Ackerley 2020

2022

Frances Stonor Saunders

2022 winner

Frances Stonor Saunders is the winner of the PEN Ackerley Prize 2022 for The Suitcase: Six Attempts to Cross a Border (Jonathan Cape).

The other two shortlisted books were Arifa Akbar, Consumed: A Sister’s Story (Sceptre) and Roy Watkins, Simple Annals: A Memoir of Early Childhood (CB Editions).

Peter Parker, Chair of the Judges, said:

‘Skillfully interweaving history and memoir, Stonor Saunders sets out in her outstandingly well-written book to discover more about the life of a father who had always seemed remote even before he slipped unreachably into the remote hinterland of Alzheimer’s. The Suitcase is not only a riveting and elegantly constructed detective story, but is a subtle and profoundly moving meditation on borders and belonging, nationality and displacement, and the far-reaching effects of major historical events upon the lives of individuals caught up in them.’

2021

Claire Wilcox

2021 winner

‘I want to thank everybody who’s been involved, everyone at PEN, everybody who loves books, all the writers I admire – I think of this great legacy of language we all share and I’m immensely touched and honoured. Thank you.’

2020

Alison Light

2020 winner

‘I am absolutely delighted to win this prize and to be in such good company – my fellow nominees, the judges who are writers themselves, and from an organisation devoted to writers and to campaigning for freedom of expression. Thank you.’

2019

Yrsa Daley-Ward

2019 winner

Yrsa Daley-Ward is the winner of the PEN Ackerley Prize 2019 for her memoir TheTerrible (Penguin).

Two other books were shortlisted for the prize The Unmapped Mind by Christian Donlan (Viking) and Gloucester Crescent by William Miller (Profile).

Peter Parker, chair of the judges, said:

‘In recent years the judges of the PEN Ackerley Prize have become aware of certain shared themes in the books they read, be it swimming, gay parents or serious illness; but it would be hard to imagine three books less like each other than those we selected for this year’s shortlist. They each take a very different approach to autobiography and deal with very different experiences of the world. What they do have in common, however, is that they exemplify the kinds of qualities that J R Ackerley strived for in his own writing. All three of them provide very frank self-portraits and are uncommonly well written, whether detailing the perils of finding your way in contemporary Britain as a young, mixed-race woman, engaging with the onset of a life-changing medical condition, or describing what it is like to be an ordinary young boy growing up among a group of famous intellectuals. Reading these three books was an exhilarating experience, and we hope that by shortlisting them we will encourage others to go out and buy them. In the end, however, it was the sheer originality, energy and fearlessness of Yrsa Daley-Ward’s The Terrible that made it this year’s winner.’

2018

Richard Beard

2018 winner

Richard Beard is the winner of the PEN Ackerley Prize 2018 for his memoir The Day That Went Missing (Harvill Secker).

Two other books were shortlisted for the prize: I Am, I Am, I Am by Maggie O’Farrell (Tinder Press) and Swimming with Seals by Victoria Whitworth (Head of Zeus).

Peter Parker, chair of the judges said:

‘The title of Richard Beard’s beautifully written memoir refers to the day in August 1978 when his nine-year-old brother accidentally drowned during a family holiday. The family’s way of dealing with this catastrophe was to suppress all mention and memory of it. Determined to discover the truth, Beard turns detective, sifting evidence and comparing conflicting accounts in order to piece together the long-buried events of that dreadful day and its lingering aftermath. Compulsively readable, fearless, and in places surprisingly funny, the book is an extraordinary act of reclamation and reconciliation.’

Accepting the prize, Richard Beard said:

‘Memoir is somewhere between history and fiction. On the shortlist we had a champion historian and a champion fiction writer, and I was very lucky to fall in between the two of them.’

2017

Amy Liptrot

2017 winner

Amy Liptrot is the winner of the PEN Ackerley Prize 2017 for her memoir The Outrun (Canongate). The book chronicles the author’s battle with addiction and her return to her home on Orkney.

Two other books were shortlisted for the prize: All at Sea by Decca Aitkenhead (4th Estate) and This Is the Place to Be by Lara Pawson (CB Editions).

Peter Parker, chair of the judges said:

‘In this exhilarating and rigorously unsentimental memoir, Amy Liptrot describes returning to her native Orkney after her life catastrophically unravels in London. Liptrot writes with wonderful clarity and invention about the experiences of being an alcoholic and about her immersive encounters with the weather, landscape, seascape and wildlife of the remote northern archipelago in which she starts to put her life back together. Although over the years a number of distinguished women writers have won the PEN Ackerley Prize, this is the first time that the judges have produced an all-women shortlist. This is of course something to celebrate, but was entirely unplanned: it just happened that Decca Aitkenhead, Amy Liptrot and Lara Pawson wrote three outstanding and compelling books that are beautifully written, have a welcome geographical reach (taking us to the West Indies, the Orkneys and Africa), and are characterised by the kind of unflinching self-revelation that was such a feature of J R Ackerley’s own books. Choosing a shortlist was a great deal easier than deciding on a winner, but after considerable debate we have awarded this year’s PEN Ackerley Prize to Amy Liptrot for The Outrun.’

2016

Alice Jolly

2016 winner

Alice Jolly is the winner of the 2016 PEN Ackerley Prize for her memoir Dead Babies and Seaside Towns (Unbound). The book chronicles the author and her husband’s quest for a baby after their second child was stillborn.

Jolly said:

‘In a world where it’s all about book sales, literary prizes are one of the few ways in which we can say ‘actually a book didn’t sell so well but its an important book so we need it’, so literary prizes are incredibly important for that reason. …

Unbound published this book when nobody else would … they stuck by this book all the way and believed in it when other people didn’t.’

Two other books were shortlisted for the prize: Pour Me: A Life by AA Gill (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) and Kid Gloves: A Voyage Round My Father (Particular Books) by Adam Mars-Jones.

Peter Parker, chair of the judges, said:

‘Although this year’s shortlist was indeed short – only three books – it was also very strong. These three books stood out, not only because they are exceptionally well written but because they tell compelling stories that hold the reader’s attention throughout. It was very difficult to decide between three such fine but very different books.’

2015

Henry Marsh

2015 winner

This book is a candid reflection on Marsh’s career as a leading neurosurgeon, describing how surgeons work, the lives they save, and the mistakes they make.

Peter Parker, chair of the judges, said:

‘Several widely praised and heavily garlanded autobiographies were published in 2014, but the PEN Ackerley judges felt that few of these delivered on their promise. Henry Marsh’s Do No Harm was, outstandingly, one that did, demonstrating all the qualities that can be found in J R Ackerley’s own books: beautifully written, recklessly honest and morally complex.

Marsh writes superbly about the intricacies of the human body, about the sometimes conflicting impulses of professional ambition and human need, and about the difficulty of talking honestly to patients and their families in times of medical crisis. These ‘Stories of Life, Death and Brain Surgery’ present a compelling argument about the moral dimension of surgical intervention and build to a touching and rueful self-portrait.’