Executive Director of Jewish Renaissance, the UK’s quarterly Jewish arts and culture magazine, and a lecturer on modern Jewish literature for LSJS and JW3, Dr Aviva Dautch, is to chair the 2022/23 Wingate Literary Prize judging panel. Dautch will be joined by Guggenheim Fellow and National Jewish Book Award winner George Prochnik, journalist, editor and author Sarah Shaffi and award winning author Julie Cohen.
Judges’ Biographies
JULIE COHEN is an award-winning, bestselling author of over 25 novels. She is an Associate Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Reading and a Vice President of the Romantic Novelists’ Association and a founder of their Rainbow Chapter for LGBTQ+ writers. Her latest novel is SUMMER PEOPLE (August 2022, Orion). She lives in Berkshire, UK with her son and a terrier of dubious origin.
DR AVIVA DAUTCH is the Executive Director of Jewish Renaissance, the UK’s quarterly Jewish arts and culture magazine, and a lecturer on modern Jewish literature for LSJS and JW3. An award-winning poet, in 2021 she was Poet in Residence for the British Museum and the resident expert on BBC Radio 4’s ‘On Form’, a series exploring the current resurgence of formal poetry. Her most recent publication is a co-translation of The Eighth Crossing, a book-length poem by BBC World Service journalist Suhrab Sirat about his refugee journey from Afghanistan to the UK (Exiled Writers Ink: 2021).
GEORGE PROCHNIK was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in general nonfiction in 2021. His new book, I Dream with Open Eyes: A Memoir about Reimagining Home will be published in September 2022. He is the author of five previous books of nonfiction including Stranger in a Strange Land, which was a New York Times editors’ choice and was short-listed for the 2018 Wingate Literary Prize in the United Kingdom. His earlier book, The Impossible Exile, was shortlisted for the 2016 Wingate Literary Prize and won the National Jewish Book Award for Biography, Autobiography, and Memoir. Prochnik is also the author of In Pursuit of Silence, Putnam Camp, and Heinrich Heine: Writing the Revolution. He has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times, Bookforum, the Literary Review and Los Angeles Review of Books. He is editor at large for Cabinet magazine.
SARAH SHAFFI is a journalist, editor and author. She writes for publications including Guardian Books, The A.V. Club and The New Arab. Sarah has previously been a judge for the Costa Novel Award and the Jhalak Prize. She is the author of the forthcoming children’s book South Asian Folktales, Myths and Legends. She can be found on Twitter @sarahshaffi.