Professors Rebecca Earle, Charles Tripp and Gary Younge join 2023 British Academy Book Prize jury as prize opens for submissions

The British Academy Book Prize for Global Cultural Understanding – the £25,000 non-fiction book prize – announces a new Chair and jury members as it opens for submissions today, Monday 16 January.

The international prize, which recognises and celebrates books that contribute to public understanding of world cultures and the way they interconnect, will be chaired this year by Professor Charles Tripp FBA, Professor Emeritus of Politics with reference to the Middle East at SOAS, University of London.

He is joined by a distinguished jury, all experts in their fields. New to the jury this year are Professor Gary Younge Hon FBA, the award-winning author, broadcaster and Professor of Sociology at the University of Manchester, and Professor Rebecca Earle FBA, food historian and Professor of History at the University of Warwick. The jury is completed by Professor Madawi Al-Rasheed FBA, Visiting Professor at the Middle East Centre at the London School of Economics, and Fatima Manji, award-winning Channel 4 News broadcaster and journalist, who serve for a third and fourth year respectively.

To mark the opening of the 2023 cycle, Alia Trabucco Zerán, winner of the 2022 British Academy Book Prize for When Women Kill: Four Crimes Retold, will be in conversation with Fatima Manji in a free online event hosted by the British Academy on Monday 16 January. The event will also be available to view afterwards on the Academy’s YouTube channel.

As the prize enters its 11th year, the British Academy will be working throughout 2023 in partnership with the London Review Bookshop and with literary festivals across the UK.

The judges are seeking books that demonstrate original and high-quality research that will also appeal to the wider reading public. They will select a shortlist of up to six books to be announced in September, and the winner will be announced in October. The winner will receive £25,000 and each of the shortlisted authors £1,000.

Professor Charles Tripp comments: “It is a great honour to be invited to chair the jury of the British Academy Book Prize. In the past ten years it has rewarded some outstanding non-fiction books that have told stories about different eras, places, cultures and societies, all of which help us to come to a better understanding of the world around us. I’m very much looking forward to reading and debating this year’s entries with my fellow jurors.”

Professor Julia Black, President of the British Academy, adds: “The British Academy is the national academy for the humanities and social sciences and it is an honour to have such an eminent jury to help us discover and reward well-researched non-fiction books that fall within these disciplines. In recent years the Prize nominations have covered a vast range of subject matters, from female murderers in Chile to the impact of revolution and empire on the global South, from racism in America to the adaptation of the Chinese language for the modern world. We can’t wait to see which books our jury will be championing this year.”

Submissions are open from today, Monday 16 January. The deadline for submissions is Tuesday 28 February 2023.

For further information about the Prize visit the British Academy website.

For enquiries about submissions, please contact: [email protected] with the subject line Query: British Academy Book Prize 2023

For media enquiries please contact:

Jane Acton E: [email protected]

T: 07971 661576.

JUDGES’ BIOGRAPHIES

CHAIR, Professor Charles Tripp FBA

Professor Emeritus of Politics, SOAS, University of London

Charles Tripp has been Professor of Politics with reference to the Middle East at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London from 2007 to 2018 and is a Fellow of the British Academy.  His PhD was from SOAS and examined Egyptian politics in the latter years of the monarchy. He has worked at the IISS in London and at the Graduate Institute for International Studies in Geneva. At SOAS he has been head of the Centre for Middle Eastern Studies and is one of the co-founders of the Centre for Comparative Political Thought. His research has mainly focused on political developments in the Middle East and includes the nature of autocracy, war and the state, as well as Islamic political thought, the politics of resistance and the relationship between art and power. He is currently working on a study of the emergence of the public and the rethinking of republican ideals in Tunisia.

His publications include Islam and the Moral Economy: The Challenge of Capitalism (Cambridge University Press, 2006); A History of Iraq (Cambridge University Press, 2007) His most recent book is The Power and the People: Paths of Resistance in the Middle East (Cambridge University Press, 2013).

Professor Madawi Al-Rasheed is Visiting Professor at the LSE Middle East Centre. In January 2017, she returned to the MEC from a sabbatical year at the Middle East Institute, the National University of Singapore. Previously, she was Research Fellow at the Open Society Foundation. Between 1994–2013, she was Professor of Anthropology of Religion at King’s College London. She was also Prize Research Fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford. She has taught at Goldsmith College, University of London and the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Oxford. Al-Rasheed has published several articles in academic journals and edited volumes on Saudi Arabia’s political development since the Arab uprisings, gender policies and current affairs. She regularly contributes to international television and print media. She is the author of Salman’s Legacy: The Dilemmas of a New Era in Saudi Arabia which was published in 2018, and her most recent book is The Son King: Reform and Repression in Saudi Arabia, published by OUP in 2021.

Professor Rebecca Earle is a writer and Professor of History at the University of Warwick. Mostly she writes about the cultural significance of food and eating in the early-modern and modern world. She’s also written about Spanish American history. She is interested in how everyday activities like eating or dressing can shed light on big historical processes such as colonialism or the emergence of racial categories. She has authored five books and over forty articles and book chapters. Her most recent book (Feeding the People: The Politics of the Potato (Cambridge University Press, 2020) uses the history of the potato to trace out some of the key features of modernity.  She is currently researching the history of cookery books.

Fatima Manji is an award-winning broadcaster and journalist, best known as one of the faces of Channel 4 News. She is regularly out on the road reporting on a range of national and international stories or in the studio grilling those in power and setting the agenda for debates of the day. Her journalism has included telling the story of the migration crisis from the borders of Europe, interviewing victims of ISIS atrocities in Iraq and challenging politicians here in the UK during elections and the referendum campaign.

Professor Gary Younge Hon FBA is an award-winning author, broadcaster and a professor of sociology at the University of Manchester.  Formerly a columnist at The Guardian he is an editorial board member of the Nation magazine and the Alfred Knobler Fellow for Type Media.

He has written five books: Another Day in the Death of America, A Chronicle of Ten Short Lives (Guardian Faber Publishing, 2016); The Speech, The Story Behind Martin Luther King’s Dream (Haymarket Books, 2013); Who Are We?, And Should it Matter in the 21st century (Penguin, 2011); Stranger in a Strange Land, Travels in the Disunited States (The New Press, 2006) and No Place Like Home, A Black Briton’s Journey Through the Deep South (Picador, 1999).  Gary’s latest book, Dispatches from the Diaspora: From Nelson Mandela to Black Lives Matter (Faber), will be published in March 2023.

He has also written for The New York Review of Books, Granta, GQ, The Financial Times and The New Statesman among others and made several radio and television documentaries on subjects ranging from gay marriage to Brexit.