From the Academy

The Academy is a great store of knowledge and opinion about great books. From time to time we ask its members to write a short piece on books they have admired. Here are some of their responses, most recently about 2015 Folio Prize winner Akhil Sharma’s Family Life, and further back about the one book they would have liked to win the Prize if it had always existed.

Teju Cole on The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald (1995)

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I would nominate The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald.

In Penelope Fitzgerald’s late-blooming career, she saw four of her nine novels shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and she won the prize in 1979 for Offshore. But her final, and finest, novel was not among those four nominations. The Blue Flower did win the National Book Critics Circle Award, but it is a book of such poise and perfection that it should have been nominated for and won every prize for which it was eligible.