Mathelinda Nabugodi, has won the 2021 Deborah Rogers Foundation Writers Award for her “engaging and fascinating” work of non-fiction The Trembling Hand: Reflections of a Black Woman in the Romantic Archive.
The Award gives £10,000 to an unpublished writer with outstanding literary talent, to enable them to complete a first book, either fiction or non-fiction. Dr Nabugodi’s book was selected from nearly 1000 entries, by a panel chaired by Colm Tóibín and including Deepa Anappara, Anna James and Ingrid Persaud as judges.
Announcing the results, Colm Tóibín said, “The award went to Mathelinda Nabugodi for The Trembling Hand: Reflections of a Black Woman in the Romantic Archive because of its ambition and scope, but also because of the quality of the enquiring voice in the book, a voice sometimes tentative and searching, then sure of its scholarship, then puzzled by some large absence in the archive, then engrossed by a poem, an essay, a letter. All the time, that voice made the reader become engaged both emotionally and intellectually in the quest to re-see and re-imagine and re-read the past.”
