24 March 2021
We couldn’t be more delighted that Carmen Maria Machado has won the prestigious Rathbones Folio Prize 2021 with her ground-breaking memoir In the Dream House.
The judges called it ‘A breathtakingly inventive, unflinchingly honest examination of domestic abuse in a female relationship’.
Tracing her relationship with a charismatic but volatile woman, Machado breaks down the idea of what the memoir form can do and be – and approaches a subject for which literary treatment has been extremely rare.
In a unanimous decision, the judges Roger Robinson, Sinéad Gleeson and Jon McGregor deemed In the Dream House the best book on what was a strong and widely discussed 2021 shortlist, also containing novels, auto-fiction, poetry, and poetry with photography.
Sinéad Gleeson said: “Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House is an exceptional, important book. It takes everything a reader expects from a memoir, and upends and deconstructs it, playing with the possibilities of the form. Machado explores queerness, domestic violence and bodies in a
multi-genre masterpiece, told in taut, stunning prose.”
Find out more at the Rathbones Folio Prize website
Follow @carmenmmachado
