Thomas Harding & Michel Laub win 2015 JQ-Wingate Prize

Jewish Quarterly Brazilian writer Michel Laub and British writer Thomas Harding (pictured above) have each been named winners of the 2015 JQ-Wingate Literary Prize; Laub in the fiction category, for Diary of the Fall,  and Harding in the non-fiction category, for Hanns and Rudolf. It's the first time in years that the award has been split into these 2 categories, recognising the phenomenal number of memoirs that the judges received this year. Read more

Extract from JQ-Wingate winning book Diary of the Fall I often dreamed about the moment of the fall, a silence that lasted a second, possibly two, a room full of sixty people and no one making a sound, as if everyone were waiting for my classmate to cry out, or even just grunt, but he lay on the ground with his eyes closed until someone told everyone else to move away because he might be injured, a scene that stayed with me until he came back to school and crept along the corridors, wearing his orthopaedic corset underneath his uniform in the cold, the heat, the sun and the rain. If, at the time, someone had asked me what affected me most deeply, seeing what happened to my classmate or the fact that my grandfather had been imprisoned in Auschwitz, and by ‘affect’ I mean to experience something intensely as palpable and ever present, a memory that doesn’t even need to be evoked to appear, I would have had no hesitation in giving my answer. Read more extracts from long and shortlisted books, plus judge interviews