Christina Sharpe

Christina Sharpe is the winner of the Hodler Prize 001 for Ordinary Notes (Farrar, Straus & Giroux).

A text composed of fragments, which posits blackness as absolutely fundamental and central to understanding the relations of domination and power at work in our societies, whatever the dominant and the dominated.

Christina Sharpe is the author of In the Wake: On Blackness and Being—named by the Guardian as one of the best books of 2016—and Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects. She is currently Canada Research Chair in Black Studies in the Department of Humanities, at York University, in Toronto.

It's customary for the debates to have been contentious, the choice painful, even stormy, but this moment of deliberation with the jury was a pure moment of happiness, unanimous enthralling and exciting.
The jury was keen to reward a book that commands respect for both its factual and formal approach, with a construction based on small touches that succeeds in bringing the reader to the heart of a monumental work without him or her even realizing it.

Ordinary Notes explores profound questions about loss and the shapes of Black life that emerge in the wake. In a series of 248 notes that gather meaning as we read them, Christina Sharpe skillfully weaves artifacts from the past—public ones alongside others that are poignantly personal—with present realities and possible futures, intricately constructing an immersive portrait of everyday Black existence. The themes and tones that echo through these pages—sometimes about language, beauty, memory; sometimes about history, art, photography, and literature—always attend, with exquisite care, to the ordinary-extraordinary dimensions of Black life.

The prize money for the Hodler Prize is 1 Bitcoin, divided equally between Christina Sharpe and the jury, i.e. 0.1 Bitcoin per person.

We can't thank the jury enough for this wonderful discussion, Martin Bethenod, Emanuele Coccia, Alex Marzano-Lesnevich, Chelsea Manning, Rachel Monroe, Tolu Ogunlesi, Diego Ongaro, Adli Takkal Bataille and Vanessa Walters.