Crowd-funded memoir wins £3,000 PEN Ackerley prize

Alice Jolly’s Dead Babies and Seaside Towns, which recounts her struggles after her second child was stillborn, takes award previously won by Alan Bennett and Jenny Diski

Alice Jolly’s crowd-funded memoir about the stillbirth of her second child, Dead Babies and Seaside Towns, has beaten books by AA Gill and Adam Mars-Jones to win the £3,000 PEN Ackerley prize.

Accepting the prize on Tuesday evening, Jolly thanked her publisher, Unbound, who she said “published this book when nobody else would … they stuck by this book all the way and believed in it when other people didn’t”. A literary crowd-funding platform that offers readers the chance to financially support books they would like to read, with the book published once an agreed level of support has been reached, Unbound is also home to Paul Kingsnorth’s award-winning novel The Wake, which was longlisted for the Man Booker prize and the Folio prize, and won the Gordon Burn prize.

Related: First person: Alice Jolly on the birth of a stillborn baby

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