RSL Giles St Aubyn Award Winner 2023 - Oliver Basciano

We are delighted to announce the 2023 winners of the RSL Giles St Aubyn Awards for first commissioned works of non-fiction:
£10,000 - Oliver Basciano - Outcast: A History of Us Through Leprosy
£5,000 - Taj Ali - Come What May, We’re Here to Stay: A Story of South Asian Resistance
£2,500 - Katherine Dunn - Right Here, Right Now: The Hidden History of How the Global Positioning System Shaped the Modern World
This year’s Awards were judged by Leila Aboulela, Fiona St Aubyn and Tom Burgis.
About Oliver Basciano:
Oliver Basciano is a journalist and critic mostly writing about the south of the world. His writing has appeared in national and international media, including ArtReview, where he is editor-at-large, The Guardian, Financial Times, Daily Telegraph, Folha de S. Paulo, Times Literary Supplement, New Statesman, The Spectator, Private Eye, The White Review and e-Flux Criticism, among others. In 2018 he was shortlisted for the Fitzcarraldo Essay Prize and the same year he was a juror for the Turner Prize.
Outcast is an important book about social connectivity and resilience. Taking leprosy’s 4,000-year history - and its enduring contemporary significance - as its central conceit, this work of astonishing narrative non-fiction is not so much a biography of a disease as it is a biography of what we understand to be ‘us’ and a potential ‘them’. It reveals how state repression of people with a disease - that is not particularly contagious - was used as a blueprint for other forms of racial, colonial, religious, economic and gender discrimination, from social Darwinism in Europe under Nazi and Soviet subjugation, to South African apartheid and the favelas of Brazil and beyond. The themes of Outcast are kaleidoscopic and global in scope, told through the lives and voices of those affected.
More information on the RSL Giles St Aubyn Awards can be found on our website: rsliterature.o...
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