MANYA WILKINSON has been announced as the winner of this year’s Wingate Literary Prize for Lublin (And Other Stories, 2024).
Lublin is a wholly unique coming of age novel, fusing fable, history and Jewish joke-making, set against the backdrop of the oncoming darkness of the 20th century.
As three young boys set off from Mezritsh with a case of bristle brushes to sell in the great market town of Lublin, wearing shoes of uneven quality and possessed of decidedly unequal enthusiasms, they quickly find that nothing, not Elya’s jokes nor Kiva’s prayers nor Ziv’s visions for a revolutionary future, can prepare them for the future as it comes barrelling down to meet them. The traditions of Yiddish narrative combine with absolutely modern techniques to create a pure, compelling, original book.
Manya Wilkinson is a Jewish New Yorker living in Newcastle, where she was senior lecturer in
prose and scriptwriting. She’s the author of a novel (Ocean Avenue), short stories, and many plays and radio dramas (broadcast on BBC Radio 4, Afternoon Play, Saturday Drama, Writing the Century, and Woman’s Hour).
The judges said:
‘What a wonderful — and excruciating — process judging this prize was. We were and are so proud of our longlist and our shortlist, showcasing such a wide range of fiction, history, memoir and biography. Each of these books conveys ‘the idea of Jewishness to the general reader’, as the Prize rubric has it — at the same time engaging with a remarkably wide variety of material. Choosing one winner was not a simple process, and there was much impassioned debate; all of us judges absolutely stand behind each of these titles. But in the end only one book can triumph, and Manya Wilkinson’s Lublin was the book that surprised us most, astonished us most, left the most lingering impression in all of our minds.’
The winner was announced at an event at Kings Place as part of Jewish Book Week, chaired by Emily Kasriel, author and Trustee of the Wingate Foundation.
Now in its 48th year, the annual prize, worth £4,000 and run in association with the Jewish Literary Foundation, is awarded to the best book, fiction or non-fiction, to convey the idea of Jewishness to the general reader. The Wingate Prize is the only UK literary prize of its kind and attracts nominations from all over the globe. Previous winners include Amos Oz, Zadie Smith, Oliver Sacks, David Grossman and, most recently, Elizabeth McCracken.
This year’s judging panel was comprised of the chair, Erica Wagner, Keiron Pim, Alice Sherwood and Rabbi Zahavit Shalev.
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NOTES TO EDITORS
Keiron Pim is the author of two biographies, Endless Flight: the Life of Joseph Roth (Granta, 2022) and Jumpin’ Jack Flash: David Litvinoff and the Rock’n’Roll Underworld (Jonathan Cape, 2016). He has taught non-fiction writing at the University of East Anglia and the National Centre for Writing, and written for the Guardian, Daily Telegraph and London Review of Books. He lives in north Norfolk with his wife and three daughters.
Rabbi Zahavit Shalev is a rabbi at New North London Synagogue. She was ordained by Leo Baeck College in 2019, and wrote her rabbinic thesis on sleep. Reading and sleeping are both equally important to her.
Alice Sherwood is a Senior Visiting Research Fellow at The Policy Institute at King’s College London and author of the award-wining Authenticity: Reclaiming Reality in a Counterfeit Culture (Harper Collins, 2022). She has served as a trustee of the London Library and the Hay Festival Foundation. She lives in London and Wales.
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 contributing writer for the New Statesman and consulting literary editor for Harper’s Bazaar. She is Editor-at-Large for a new publication, Boundless. 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.
The Wingate Literary Prize was established in 1977 by the late Harold Hyam Wingate. It is now run in association with JW3, the Jewish Community Centre. The winner receives £4,000.
The Harold Hyam Wingate Charitable Foundation is a private grant-giving institution, established over forty years ago.
The Jewish Literary Foundation works to spread awareness, recognition and enjoyment of the best in ideas and great Jewish writing to as wide an audience as possible, including the annual Book Week festival, an emerging writers’ programme, a schools’ programme, a translation prize, year-round events and a free digital platform with 1,000 hours of video content.