Author and editor Erica Wagner is to chair the Wingate Literary Prize judging panel. Wagner will be joined by the novelists Xiaolu Guo and Kate Weinberg and rabbi and the Director of Strategy for Masorti Judaism in the UK, Adam Zagoria-Moffet. Now in its 48th year, the annual £4,000 prize, run in association with Jewish Literary Foundation, is awarded to the best book – fiction or non-fiction – to convey the idea of Jewishness to the general reader.
As British Jewry’s most prestigious book award it attracts nominations from all over the world.
The winner of the 2024 / 25 Prize was Manya Wilkinson for Lublin. Previous winners also include Nicolle Krauss, Amos Oz, Zadie Smith, Oliver Sacks, David Grossman and Linda Grant.
The prize longlist will be announced late 2025.
For further information, please contact Anna Pallai anna@ampliterary.co.uk
Follow the Wingate Literary Prize on Bluesky @thewingateprize and on Instagram @The_Wingate_Prize
Follow the Jewish Literary Foundation on Bluesky @jewishliteraryfoundation.co.uk and on Instagram @jewishliteraryfoundation
NOTES TO EDITORS
Judges’ Biographies
Xiaolu Guo‘s novels include A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers (Shortlisted for the Women’s Prize), Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth, and I Am China. Her memoir Once Upon A Time In The East won the National Book Critics Circle Award 2017 and shortlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize. Her nonfiction Radical was published by Vintage 2023, followed by My Battle of Hastings. Her 2025 novel Call Me Ishmaelle is a retelling of Melville’s Moby Dick. Named as a Granta’s Best of Young British Novelist in 2013, she also directed a dozen films, including How Is Your Fish Today (Sundance Official Selection, Grand Prix of International Women Film Festival France) and UFO In Her Eyes (TIFF). Her feature She, A Chinese received the Golden Leopard at the Locarno Film Festival 2009. She had her film retrospectives at London’s Whitechapel Gallery 2019, Cinematheque Switzerland 2011, and at the Greek Film Archive 2018. Guo has been a visiting professor at Columbia University in New York, and a Samuel Fischer Professor at the Free University in Berlin. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Erica Wagner’s latest book is Mary and Mr Eliot: A Sort Of Love Story. She was the literary editor of the London Times for seventeen years and is a consulting editor on the comment pages of The Observer, contributing writer for the New Statesman, consulting literary editor for Harper’s Bazaar and a host of the CHANEL podcast, “Les Rencontres”. She is the author of Chief Engineer: Washington Roebling, The Man Who Built the Brooklyn Bridge, winner of the Eccles Centre and Hay Festival Writer’s Award; her other books are Ariel’s Gift, Seizure, Gravity and she is the editor of First Light, a celebration of the work of Alan Garner. She was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2023 and in 2025 was awarded a Public Humanities Fellowship by the School of Advanced Study, University of London.
Kate Weinberg‘s most recent novel There’s Nothing Wrong With Her was inspired by her battle with Long Covid during the pandemic. Her campaign to raise awareness around invisible illnesses included appearances on the BBC Today Programme, Sky News, Radio 2 and Times Radio. Her debut, The Truants, was published in 2020 and was a Book of the Year in The New York Times, The Observer, The Ipaper, The Irish Times and USA Today. After working as an English teacher in Rome, Kate took an MA in Creative Writing at UEA before returning to London to become a fiction and non-fiction editor and Creative Writing teacher. As a freelance journalist she has written regularly for The Daily Telegraph, The Financial Times, The Times, The Spectator, The Daily Mail and The Guardian. She lives in London with her husband and two children.
Adam Zagoria-Moffet is the rabbi of St. Albans Masorti Synagogue (SAMS) and the Director of Strategy for Masorti Judaism in the UK. He was ordained from the Jewish Theological Seminary where he also received an MA in Jewish Thought. He grew up in Phoenix, Arizona, and has lived in Minnesota, New York, and Israel before moving to the UK. His interests are primarily in mysticism, ethics, and Sephardic Judaism and culture. He also runs Izzun Books, a small independent publisher of unusual Jewish titles. He lives in St. Albans with his family.