A beautifully illustrated new memoir of a life in art, a father and daughter, and what a shared love of a painting can come to mean. 'We see with everything that we are' On the morning of 12 October 1654, a gunpowder explosion devastated the Dutch city of Delft. The thunderclap was heard over seventy miles away. Among the fatalities was the painter Carel Fabritius, dead at thirty-two, leaving only his haunting masterpiece The Goldfinch and barely a dozen known paintings. The explosion that killed him also buried his reputation, along with answers to the mysteries of his life and career. What happened to Fabritius before and after this disaster is just one of the discoveries in a book that explores the relationship between art and life, interweaving the lives of Laura Cumming, her Scottish painter father, who also died too young, and the great artists of the Dutch Golden Age. This is a book about what a picture may come to mean: how it can enter your life and change your thinking in a thunderclap.

- Browns Books Synopsis

Each year, three or five members of the Academy will be invited to judge the Prize. The sole criterion for judgment will be excellence: to identify works of literature in which the subjects being explored achieve their most perfect and thrilling expression. The judges consider a total of 60 books, which will be nominated by the Academy. Further books will be called-in from publishers; from these call-ins, the judges can make a total of 20 selections, bringing the total number of books under consideration to 80. In 2023, the judges will create three distinct shortlists from these 80 titles in Fiction, Non-Fiction and Poetry. Each category winner, selected from a shortlist of five, will receive a £2,000 prize. One book will then be crowned overall Rathbones Folio Prize winner, with the author receiving an additional £30,000. The shortlist winners and overall winner will be announced at the annual Rathbones Folio Prize ceremony and presented with a cheque for their Prize money.