Winners announced for the Shakespeare’s Globe Book Award 2023
The Shakespeare’s Globe Book Award 2023 is given to Ben Higgins and Noémie Ndiaye!
In a field crowded with exemplary first books on Shakespeare and early modern drama, Noémie Ndiaye’s Scripts of Blackness: Early Modern Performance Culture and the Making of Race (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022) and Ben Higgins’s Shakespeare’s Syndicate: The First Folio, its Publishers, and the Early Modern Book Trade (Oxford University Press, 2022) stood out for their ambition, insight and superbly elegant execution.
Ben and Noémie share prize winnings of £3,000, and receive an invitation to deliver a talk in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse on Thursday 19 October.
The Shakespeare’s Globe Book Award is awarded every two years to an early career scholar who has produced a first book that makes a significant contribution to our understanding and appreciation of the theatre of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.
The Award, which is generously supported by an anonymous patron, was judged by Will Tosh (Head of Research, Shakespeare’s Globe), Hanh Bui (Teaching and Research Fellow, Shakespeare’s Globe), Daniel Starza Smith (Senior Lecturer, King’s College London) and the 2020 winners of the Award, Oliver Morgan and Emma Whipday.
The judges chose among seven shortlisted titles, from twenty-five eligible books submitted by academic presses across the world.
Shakespeare’s Globe Book Award 2023 winners
Ben Higgins’s Shakespeare’s Syndicate: The First Folio, its Publishers, and the Early Modern Book Trade (Oxford University Press, 2022)
Noémie Ndiaye’s Scripts of Blackness: Early Modern Performance Culture and the Making of Race (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022)
Booking is now open for the winners’ lecture on 19 October.
The judges said about Noémie’s book:
“We were uniformly astonished by the scope of Noémie Ndiaye’s Scripts of Blackness. She tells a vital new story about the racialisation of blackness and Afro-diasporic people in the theatrical canon of three intersecting Atlantic cultures: England, Spain and France. Thanks to her mastery of the archives of three languages, Ndiaye’s readers are treated to dazzling new readings of Shakespeare, Webster and Brome, as well as a thrilling account of the bodily and vocal reality of racial performance.”
On Shakespeare’s Syndicate, the judges said:
“We didn’t expect there was a whole new story about the First Folio awaiting Ben Higgins’s exceptional narrative eye and analytical mind. His Shakespeare’s Syndicate weaves an astonishing story of literary ambition and business acumen from the lives of the four stationers responsible for Shakespeare’s collected works, and makes the bookish world of early modern London live again in the folio’s anniversary year.”
Chair of judges Will Tosh said about the shortlisted titles:
“It’s been a tremendous privilege to read the work of our shortlisted authors, who represent the best of the thriving field of Shakespeare scholarship. Fictions of Consent by Urvashi Chakravarty, Strangeness in Jacobean Drama by Callan Davies, Rogue Sexuality in Early Modern English Literature by Ari Friedlander, Unfixable Forms by Katherine Schaap Williams and Tasting Difference by Gitanjali G. Shahani take immediate pride of place on my reading list of unmissable new monographs. Huge congratulations to them all.”
