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 the books shortlisted for the 2014 Prize, and further back about the one book they would have liked to win the Prize if it had always existed.

Johanna Skibsrud on Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee and Walker Evans (1941)

Let us Now Praise Famous MenThough James Agee and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men has now secured its place within literary history, I believe that the Folio Prize - were it to have existed in 1941 - might have been able to recognize this book for the gloriously flawed masterpiece it is. A book which defies all category, this collaborative project is at once both documentary and poem, manifesto and dirge, dream and … whatever it is within a work of art that announces itself - beyond realism - as an immediate and profound reality.