The Award
Winner of the Jane Grigson Trust Award
for New Food Writers 2019 Announced
The Jane Grigson Trust is delighted to announce that for the first time, the judges have decided to award the prize to two of the shortlisted authors.
The winners of the 2019 Jane Grigson Trust Award are:
Elly McCausland (@nutmegs_seven) for The Botanical Kitchen and Dan Saladino (@DanSaladinoUK) for The Ark of Taste.
In The Botanical Kitchen, food blogger and literature lecturer Elly McCausland takes an in-depth look at our love affair with every part of the plant – fruits, flowers, leaves and seeds, from orchards to the tropics, tea leaves to tayberries – and shows how they enhance flavour, dramatically shifting and developing the character of a dish. To be published byAbsolute Press, March 2020.
In The Ark of Taste, radio journalist Dan Saladino takes the reader on a revelatory journey of discovery into the world’s most endangered foods and disappearing flavours, starting with the blood oranges of his family’s Sicilian roots, in order to better understand the world and our place in it. To be published by Jonathan Cape, Spring 2020.
The runner-up is Selina Periampillai (@selinaperiam) for The Island Kitchen which will be published by Bloomsbury in May 2019. In The Island Kitchen, the private cook and recipe consultant, who is of Mauritian descent, celebrates the vibrant, exciting and varied home cuisines of the Indian Ocean, including recipes for dishes such as Seychellois Creole Octopus Salad and Peanut Pumpkin Stew from Madagascar. To be published by Bloomsbury, May 2019.
Chair of judges of the Jane Grigson Trust Award, Geraldene Holt, comments;
“The field of applications was the strongest we’ve yet received, with an amazingly wide variety of subjects and treatments, and the decision of who should be the final winner was incredibly difficult to make. The judges have therefore decided that, with such talented entrants, the award should be made to two authors who between them exemplify the best of modern food writing.
“Elly’s is a very well-researched book taking a refreshing view of cooking with seeds and spices, leaves and flowers of familiar and also little-known ingredients. She brings these flavours into focus in a totally delicious way. Dan Saladino’s book examines the quiet tragedy of endangered foods. He asks important questions about how and why this is happening and inspires us to act. His book is an eloquent cry for action.”
Created in memory of the distinguished British food writer Jane Grigson, the £2000 award – which will be shared between Elly and Dan – is made to a first-time writer of a book on food or drink which has been commissioned but has not yet been published. The runners-up receive £100 of book tokens. All shortlisted authors receive copies of The Best of Jane Grigson.
The winners were announced at an award ceremony at Quo Vadis restaurant in Soho on Monday 18 March.
The judges for the 2019 Award are: Geraldene Holt (author; chair of the Jane Grigson Trust); Clarissa Hyman (Trustee of the JGT); Josceline Dimbleby (author of cookery and travel books and a founding Trustee of the JGT); William Sitwell (food writer, presenter and critic) and Jeremy Lee (chef at Quo Vadis London and food writer and Trustee of the JGT).
For media enquiries, please contact Laura Creyke at MHM on laura@markhutchinsonnamagement.co.uk / 07951 777407 / @MarkHMgmt
The Jane Grigson Trust launched the Award for new food and drink writers in 2015 in honour of the twenty-fifth anniversary of Jane’s death.
Jane’s observation on writing, made in the last year of her life, has been a guiding principle in this award:
Writing a book is for me an act of faith and folly. You have a plan of course, but you bluster about in the work, following blindly, one step after another, slogging it out in the early stages. Then suddenly you come across one thing, one reference, one passage, that explains to you why you are writing this particular book, that gives you the theme, that shows you the way. You have in a sense to earn this discovery. It is a reward.
Literary prizes are usually given for newly published works or for books already on sale. The Jane Grigson Trust Award is, however, given to a promising new writer ahead of publication in order to help them discover ‘one thing, one reference, one passage… that gives you the theme, that shows you the way’.
The £2000 award is made to a writer new to food and drink writing (although they may have written on other subjects) who has already received a commission from a publishing house but whose book has not yet been published. In the spirit of Jane, the Award is for a non-fiction book on food and drink in the widest sense – so it could be a cook book, memoir, travel, history or anything else for that matter, so long as the primary subject is food or drink.
The Jane Grigson Trust intends that the writer will use the Award for further travel/research to deepen their knowledge of their chosen subject in the vital time between gaining a commission and delivery of the script.
Past Winners
The winner of the Jane Grigson Trust award 2018 was:
Angela Clutton: The Vinegar Cupboard
In this fascinating and unique book, food writer and historian Angela Clutton demonstrates the many great ways vinegars can be used to balance and bring flavour, which will enable modern cooks to make the most of this ancient ingredient (to be published by Absolute Press in February 2019).
The winner of the Jane Grigson Trust award 2017 was:
Vicky Hayward: The New Art of Cookery: A Spanish Friar’s Kitchen Notebook
Drawing on her deep knowledge of Spanish culture, Vicky Hayward gives a modern retelling of an eighteenth-century classic cookbook, including fresh, simple and surprisingly easy to make recipes. (Published by Rowman & Littlefield in the UK in September 2017)
Vicky said of winning the Award:
The winner of the Jane Grigson Trust award 2016 was:
Alex Andreou: The Magic Bay Leaf
In an evocative mix of memoir and recipes, Alex Andreou writes about the food of the Greek islands. (To be published by Chatto & Windus – awaiting publication)
