The Suitcase: Six Attempts to Cross a Border by Frances Stonor Saunders has won the £3,000 (about $3,555) 2022 PEN Ackerley Prize, which is dedicated to memoir and autobiography. The book traces the author's father's "long journey as a boy escaping Bucharest during the Second World War to become a refugee in Turkey, Egypt, South Africa."
Chair of judges Peter Parker said in part: "Skillfully interweaving history and memoir, Stonor Saunders sets out in her outstandingly well-written book to discover more about the life of a father who had always seemed remote even before he slipped unreachably into the remote hinterland of Alzheimer's. The Suitcase is not only a riveting and elegantly constructed detective story, but is a subtle and profoundly moving meditation on borders and belonging, nationality and displacement, and the far-reaching effects of major historical events upon the lives of individuals caught up in them."