British Society of Sports History: Lord Aberdare Prize Short List 2023
The shortlist for this year’s British Society of Sports History, Lord Aberdare Prize Short List 2023 is live. Check out the official page: here.
I had the pleasure of being on this year’s judging panel with Malcolm MacLean and Erica Munkwitz. It was my first time on the panel and I’ve learned a lot about a variety of sports history topics (41 texts submitted in total) and the art of shortlisting. A huge thank you to BSSH, Malcolm and Erica.
Here is a breakdown of the shortlist and some of the social media interactions since the announcements:
After considerable discussion and careful consideration of the 41 titles submitted for the 2023 Lord Aberdare Literary Award, the judges have decided on a comparatively long short list, recognising the richness of this year’s submissions from a diverse set of publishers.
We worked to three criteria:
Does the book make a contribution to the field?
Is the book engaging?
Is the book well-written?
We were purposefully broad in our assessment of ‘contribution’, taking the view that this could include, among other things exploration of new areas of study, opening up well established areas to revision and comprehensive assessment, or extending the work of sport history to new audiences. We also, in the second and third criteria noted the difference between literary merit (well-written) and ability to keep a reader’s attention (engaging).
Shortlist (in author alphabetical order)
Paul Darby, James Esson and Christian Ungruheal
African football migration: Aspirations, experiences and trajectories
Manchester University Press
This discussion of a key element of the global labour market in contemporary sport manages to both straddle complex disciplinary boundaries – sociology, geography, and anthropology – to present a well historicised, sharply insightful analysis of football migration, mainly from West Africa, in the last two decades. The case highlights the potential for transdisciplinary insight and asserts the importance of trans-national study, outlooks, and awareness, asserting the place of historical practice in the wider sport studies field. The book does this in a way that is carefully structured, builds its argument clearly and effectively, and that holds the reader’s interest well.
The rise in women’s rugby over the last 25 years has yet to produce any significant impact on our historical understanding of the sport, despite a growing sophisticated body of research literature, journal articles and doctoral dissertations. Donnelly has a long involvement in British and Irish rugby and paints a picture of a game that grew organically, organised by players and aficionados, with a strong sense that those women organisers and the games players keep going in many cases in spite of the actions of the game’s institutions. This is a rich exploration of the formation and growth of women’s rugby an international reach and powerful insider perspective that also challenges us to begin to pay more attention this increasingly significant game.
Finally, being a sporting history nerd is paying off! So lovely to wake up to this news – thanks to all @BritSportHisSoc for this lovely nomination. Feel v strongly about making sure the often lost history of women’s sports are found & preserved so was glad to do my bit for rugby https://t.co/mrBSeWPGPS
Suzanne Lenglen, as one of the great sports stars of the inter-war years, is well-known in sport history circles, but not so much beyond. Tom Humberstone’s illustrated narrative biography of Lenglen does several things extremely: he selects key moments in her life as ways to tell the bigger story; he evokes the era extremely well; he has built a visually arresting narrative; and he effectively depicts both the movement and experience of sport. This is a superb, beautiful and elegant illustrated narrative that not only tells a compelling story of an elite athlete and celebrity who died tragically young in an artistically impressive form and should reach out to a new audience to introduce one of the great athletes to those who would otherwise be highly unlikely to encounter her.
Suzanne by @TomHumberstone has been shortlisted for the Lord Aberdare Literary Prize! This prize is awarded by the British Society of Sports History for books based on sports history written by British authors.
Incredibly validating to be nominated by the British Society of Sports History – and alongside such great company – after all that research! https://t.co/UrMExw8Fqp
Football’s Great War: Association Football on the English Home Front, 1914 1918
Pen & Sword Books
Alex Jackson’s richly cast history unpacks the complexities of wartime sport, blending narrative histories with cross-sectional thematic analysis, effectively demarcating his topic off from the more extensively discussed question of military sport. Jackson covers an awful lot of ground and issues while his grasp of his material means these are well managed the demands and gravitas of the questions at hand do not overwhelm the experience of reading. The book is well produced, matching Jackson’s engaging and accessible style, maintaining academic rigour and sharpness while reaching an audience well beyond the usual academic one.
Chuffed to have made the shortlist for the book prize of the British Society of Sports History. Big shout to @docleeworthy for all the help getting it this far! https://t.co/ievURgIzzt
It is hard to separate histories of modern English sport from religion, although that association often goes no further than the motif of the muscular Christian. Hugh McLeod paints a picture of the sport-Christianity relationship marked by four principal periods each of which is marked by trends and orientations to contested but dominant views, each is marked by multiple strands reflecting McLeod’s depiction of religion as far from monolithic. This same sense of multiplicity emerges when he turns to relations within other non-Christian faiths as well as between them. That is to say, this is a complex, subtle, nuanced elegant analysis that enriches our understanding of English sport history while also being subject to critical assessment and evaluation as a driver of new research programmes.
Cricket, Public Culture and the Making of Postcolonial Calcutta
Cambridge University Press
In exploring Calcutta’s meanings of cricket, Souvik Naha poses questions of ideology and meaning, narrative and memory, zeitgeist and representation, to not only ask what cricket means, but what it means in Calcutta, how it made the city what it is, and how the city made it. These are complex challenges to the dominant image of cricket as quintessentially Indian, extending critical social histories of the game to a more nuanced world of meaning and its making. Drawing in a rich array of sources and sharp insight, the case offers a rich insight to the meaning of Indian cricket that gets well beyond the popular tales of ironic postcolonial practice and the simplicities of national fervour.
Different Class: The Untold Story of English Cricket
Repeater Books
One of the major gaps in scholarly writing on English cricket is the amateur player, not as the gentlemanly elite of aristocratic amateurism, but the regular club player in the teams that keep the lower leagues running. These players may appear in the village green fantasy of the game, but these are not the clubs and players Duncan Stone explores in this sharply critical and insightful, engagingly crafted unpacking of the amateur game to reveal a pastime deeply marked by class and racialized divisions. Drawing on an impressive set of historical and contemporary sources, including extensive interviews with players, this scholarly work reaches well beyond the academy in its intended readership.
The winner will be announced at the BSSH Conference, August 24 & 25, 2023.
We are grateful to the authors of all 41 submitted works for their time, craft, work, and contribution to the field, and to the generosity of publishers in submitting books for consideration and their continuing commitment to publishing quality sports history.
Malcolm MacLean, Erica Munkwitz and Verity Postlethwaite
Lord Aberdare Literary Prize, 2023
I am happy to chat to anyone interested in hearing more about the books, the shortlisting process or BSSH! Looking forward to being in Manchester next week for the BSSH Annual Conference.
veritypostlethwaite.com 