Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT and the Race That Will Change the World by Parmy Olson (published in the U.S. by St. Martin's Press) has won the £30,000 (about $38,320) 2024 Business Book of the Year Award, sponsored by the Financial Times and Schroders and recognizing a book that offers "most compelling and enjoyable insight into modern business issues."
Roula Khalaf, editor of the Financial Times, said: "Hassabis and Sam Altman are two of today's most influential entrepreneurs. In her deeply reported account, Parmy Olson brilliantly frames the development of artificial intelligence as a thrilling race to master the technology, build a business, and dominate the technological future."
Schroders's outgoing group CEO Peter Harrison called Supremacy "timely and compelling" and said it "provides deep insights into the defining technology of our age that are impossible to find elsewhere."
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ISDAL by Susannah Dickey won the inaugural PEN Heaney Prize, which recognizes a single volume of poetry by one author, published in the U.K. or Ireland, "of outstanding literary merit that engages with the impact of cultural or political events on human conditions or relationships." The award is presented by English PEN, together with Irish PEN/PEN na hÉireann and the Estate of Seamus Heaney.
The judging panel said: "Susannah Dickey's ISDAL is an astonishingly inventive look at a cold case, that of an unidentified woman found in 1970 near Bergen in Norway. Armed with a wide variety of forms and a formidable vocabulary, Dickey explores and satirizes the true crime genre, and specifically our culture's obsession with female victims."
Dickey commented: "The Heaney family continues to do such brilliant work in Seamus's name, and the mission statement of this prize is such a necessary one. I believe poetry to be uniquely capable of querying and critiquing the linguistic structures that underpin the systems which dictate our lives, and in my mind there's no doubt that Heaney was one of the very best to do it. I'm very grateful that [the judges] may have thought my work somewhat successful in this regard, and I'm so happy to be a fragrant blight on the poetry landscape."