Professor Margo Jefferson Takes Home the 2023 Rathbones Folio Prize

Professor Margo Jefferson (JRN ’71) has been awarded the 2023 Rathbones Folio Prize for Constructing a Nervous System: a Memoir (Pantheon, 2022).

First awarded in 2014 (when it was known as the Folio Prize), the Rathbones Folio Prize is open to all works of literature written in English and published in the UK and is worth over £30,000. All genres and all forms of literature are eligible, except work written primarily for children.

This was the first year of the Rathbones Folio Prize’s new format, in which a winner was named in each of three categories (fiction, nonfiction and poetry), with those titles then competing for the overall prize. 

Jefferson won the nonfiction category, while the fiction award went to Michelle de Kretser for Scary Monsters. The poetry prize was given to Victoria Adukwei Bulley for her debut collection Quiet. The category winners each received £2,000, and Jefferson received an additional £30,000 for winning the overall award. Previous Folio prize winners include Colm Tóibín, Carmen Maria Machado, Raymond Antrobus, Hisham Matar, and George Saunders.

The judges for the Rathbones Folio Prize are chosen from the members of the Folio Academy. This year’s panel featured authors Ali Smith, Jackie Kay, and Guy Gunaratne, who called Constructing a Nervous System “astounding and rhapsodic…wholly a deeply moving delight” and a “book unlike any other; a thrilling, generous, spirited and surprising read that remakes culture, redresses history, renews and repurposes everything it touches, and passes on these gifts of reinvention and renewal to everyone who’ll read it.”

Jefferson accepted the prize at the awards ceremony held at the British Library at the end of March. “I didn’t want a unified self or a unified language in the book, which these other larger forms can impose,” she said in her acceptance speech. “I wanted a hybrid mix of pleasure, anger, praise, grief, analysis, impulse, and confrontation…This is a writers’ prize. I will say it again—this is a Writers’ Prize; nothing is more precious than knowing that other writers take their time, their energy and imagination to really appreciate what I—what every writer in this room—have tried and will keep trying, and hoping so much, to do. Thank you, thank you and thank you! “

Margo Jefferson is Pulitzer Prize-winning critic, and a 2022 recipient of the Windham-Campbell Prize for Nonfiction. She has published three books: Constructing a Nervous System: a memoir (2022); Negroland: a Memoir (2015;) and On Michael Jackson (2005). Negroland won the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography, The International Bridge Prize, The Heartland Prize and was short-listed for the Baillie Gifford Prize. She has been a staff arts critic for The New York Times and Newsweek, and has published in New York Magazine, The Nation, The Washington Post, The Believer, Guernica, Bookforum, O and VOGUE. Her essays have been anthologized in: The Best American Essays, 2015; The Inevitable: Contemporary Writers Confront Death; What My Mother Gave Me; The Best African-American Essays, 2014; The Mrs. Dalloway Reader; Black Cool, The Sammy Davis, Jr. Reader and The Jazz Cadence of American Culture.