Wingate Literary Prize

Kertész wins the 2006 Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Literary Prize

The Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Literary Prize, sponsored by the Harold Hyam Wingate Foundation, is Britain’s only major literary award for Jewish-interest books. The Judges for 2006 were:

• broadcaster and writer Oona King, MP for Bethnal Green and Bow, 1997-2005(Chair)
• historian and BBC radio producer Eliane Glaser
• playwright and theatre director Julia Pascal
• actor, writer and comedian David Schneider.

They shortlisted the following titles:

Michael Arditti’s Unity (Maia Press)

Imre Kertész’s Fatelessness (Harvill)

Paul Kriwaczek’s Yiddish Civilisation: The Rise and Fall of a Forgotten Nation (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)

Neill Lochery’s The View from the Fence: The Arab-Israeli Conflict from the Present to Its Roots (Continuum)

Jean Molla’s Sobibor (Aurora Metro)

Nicholas Stargardt’s Witnesses of War: Children’s Lives under the Nazis (Jonathan Cape)

Tamar Yellin’s The Genizah at the House of Shepher (Toby Press)

The prize of £5,000 was given to Imre Kertész at an awards ceremony on 3 May 2006, where it was accepted on his behalf by his translator Tim Wilkinson. Oona King said that she and her fellow Judges had been ‘delighted to be able to select such a strong and diverse shortlist, where each of the books had exceptional merits. They were chosen because they were exciting literature which also touched in different ways on essential elements of the Jewish experience.’ She praised Fatelessness as ‘an utterly absorbing and transformative book’ which took ‘a long, hard, matter-of-fact look at Buchenwald through the eyes of a 14-year-old boy . . . Because Kertész views the Holocaust from the inside, he compels us to leave our preconceptions and hindsight at the concentration-camp gates . . . Everyone, whether Jewish or not, should make time in their lives to read this book.’