Book Prize

The BSLS is delighted to announce the winner of its Book Prize for 2020: Biofictions: Race, Genetics and the Contemporary Novel (Bloomsbury Academic) by Josie Gill.

Josie Gill’s study of race and genetics in late twentieth and early twenty-first century fiction is critically engaged with science and its contexts, lucidly written, and politically urgent. Covering novels by, among others, Zadie Smith, Kazuo Ishiguro, Octavia Butler, and Colson Whitehead, it argues that the idea of race in genetic science is a biofiction, ‘an idea constituted through the complex entanglement of scientific and fictive forms.’ It takes in the sciences relevant to ancestry, human genomic diversity, epigenetics, and examines their relations to the changing social contexts for concepts of ‘race’ and anti-racist politics. In doing so, it illuminates how concepts of ‘race’ remain latent even when contemporary genetic science seems to have undermined the concept. Wearing its scholarship lightly, this outstanding study welcomes both the specialist in contemporary literature, the general reader, and, we hope, readers from the sciences.

Biofictions is available on open access funded by Knowledge Unlatched.

The British Society for Literature and Science is pleased to announce the shortlist for the 2020 book prize. The five shortlisted books are (alphabetically by author's surname):

Will Abberley, Mimicry and Display in Victorian Literary Culture: Nature, Science and the Nineteenth-Century Imagination (CUP)

Andrea Charise. The Aesthetics of Senescence: Aging, Population, and the Nineteenth-Century British Novel (SUNY Press)

Josie Gill, Biofictions: Race, Genetics and the Contemporary Novel (Bloomsbury Academic)

Tom Nurmi, Magnificent Decay: Melville and Ecology (University of Virginia Press)

Sara Wasson, Transplantation Gothic: Tissue transfer in literature, film, and medicine (Manchester University Press)

The prize of £150 will be awarded to the best book published in 2020 in the field of literature and science. The winner will be announced at this year's online conference.

Nominations are now being accepted for the BSLS Book Prize 2020. Inaugurated in 2007, the annual British Society for Literature and Science book prize is awarded for the best book in the field of literature and science published that year. Any book is eligible, but can only be considered if it is nominated either by a member of BSLS or by its publisher. Publishers are very welcome to nominate their own books, and members may nominate their own titles. Please note that individual memberships must be current and the publication in question must be dated 2020 to be eligible. Members of the BSLS committee are not eligible for the Prize. A panel of BSLS executive committee members and scholars will read all submissions, with the winner announced at our 2021 online conference. Please send all nominations to Michael Whitworth on bslsbookprize@gmail.com by 31 December 2020.

For a list of past winners and shortlisted titles, see here.