Biographers Club Prize
Andrew Lownie, who has administered the Biographers’ Club Prize since its inauguration in 1999 and who is now handing over to Anna Swan, reflects on the submissions over the last seven years.
In 1999 I founded the Biographers’ Club Prize because I felt there was a need for a prize that would help finance the research for a biography proposal. There were plenty of prizes which rewarded established writers but at that time nothing which encouraged new biographers. Interestingly and encouragingly, since then several themed prizes have been set up by literary agencies or publishers working with writing courses and offering representation or contracts.
From the start, the £1,000 prize has fulfilled a gap in the market. Many entrants, and not only the winners, have had their proposals commissioned and the awards lunch in the autumn is always packed with editors and agents.
What has struck me most is the range of excellent subjects, many of them living or whom the biographers knew personally and the great number of proposed books about writers, actors, sportsmen or reformers.
The difficulties for the judges over the years have been in deciding between proposals which would make obvious commercial books and more specialist subject areas and, at the beginning, between proposals in different formats, including some hand-written entries. This is why a suggested standard format was proposed a few years ago and entrants are now encouraged to submit by email to save on time and costs.
The first year brought few submissions, in spite of media coverage in diary columns, the Bookseller and notices sent to various university history departments. However, there was one outstanding submission. At lunch at the Westbury Hotel the judges Michael Holroyd and Nigel Hamilton agreed there was clear winner – Lucy Jago , a BBC journalist who had been educated at Cambridge. She immediately signed a six-figure contract with Hamish Hamilton and her book was published in the UK and US two years later. She has gone on to write the tie-in book to Regency House Party.
In 2000 twenty-seven entries were short-listed; fourteen were from female writers and twelve on female subjects. There was again a clear winner for judges Victoria Glendinning, Richard Holmes and Frances Spalding and it was felt there was no need to meet. Australian academic Adrienne Gavin won with her proposal for a life of Anna Sewell, author of Black Beauty, and she went on to sign a contract with Sutton who published her book in 2004.
As a result of articles on the Prize in the Society of Authors magazine, Writers News and Competitions Bulletin and the support of Book Trust and the Daily Mail (who now sponsored the prize), the number of entries grew. Submissions that year included proposals for lives of Eleanor of Castile; the Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima (from a writer in Japan); Clara Collet, the lover of George Gissing; the educationalist and campaigner Josephine Butler; Isobel Osbourne who was the step-daughter of R.L. Stevenson; the brother-in-law of George Orwell, Laurence O’Shaughnessy; Lenin’s mistress Inessa Armand; the radio pioneer Guglielmo Marconi; the poet Pauline Tarn; the novelist and playwright Eden Phillpotts; the Dolly Sisters (subsequently commissioned by Constable); a joint biography of Isaac and Benjamin Disraeli; a dual biography of the author’s grandparents who had served the Raj; the composer and dramatist Arnold Safroni by his grandson; the mountaineer Len York; the caver Penelope Powell; the contemporary novelist Dee Williams; the biblical scholar Charles Oxley; the suffragist Eva Gore-Booth, and one for Serajur and Sophie Rahman which also aimed to cover the history of the Bengali community in the United Kingdom.
In 2001 twenty-one entries were short-listed. They included the Labour politician George Barnes; the World middleweight boxing champion Randolph Turpin; the impresario Duncan MacKinnon; the nineteenth-century MP Will Crooks; Richard Pankhurst, husband of Emmeline Pankhurst; the entertainer Rex Jameson; the novelist Edward Douwes Dekker (Multatuli); the actor Jack Hawkins by his widow; the Portuguese diplomat the Marques de Soveral; two Irish nuns in Texas by their niece; the life of a woman whose son was murdered; several memoirs and a collection of biographical essays on ‘various heroic people’.
The winner, a barrister and farmer, was Adrian Fort for a biography of Lord Cherwell, subsequently published by Cape. Again it was a clear choice for judges Anne de Courcy, Selina Hastings and Alan Judd, and it was not felt necessary to meet but special mention was made of Jessie Childs’ life of the Earl of Surrey, which was subsequently also sold to Cape as Henry V111’s Last Victim, and Pauline Halford who had submitted again and went on to place her book on Robert Fitzroy with Sutton.
Twenty-two submissions were short-listed for 2002. They included proposals for lives of Queen Victoria’s granddaughter Grand Duchess Elizaveta Feodorovna who was murdered by the Bolsheviks in 1918; the Stuart courtier Henry Jermyn (which will be published later this year); the welfare campaigner Emily Hobhouse; the novelist and dramatist Mary Mitford; the nurse Clare Hedley-Peek by her great niece (the book was published in 2005); the actors Yul Brynner and Kenneth Williams; the writers Leslie Charteris, Rupert Grayson and R.F. Delderfield; the dancer Tilly Losch; the children’s author Monica Edwards; the Northern Irish politician Terence O’Neill; the rally driver (and Chief Constable of Northamptonshire) John Gott; a joint biography of Henry Irving, Bram Stoker, Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw; the SOE heroine Noor Inayat Khan; an SAS officer in Malaya, Oman and Northern Ireland between 1947 and 1982; the French critic and author Anatole Bisk; the photographer Julia Margaret Cameron; the black footballer Walter Tull and the nineteenth-century penal reformer Matthew Davenport Hill.
Lyndall Gordon and Mary Lovell met for lunch at the Lansdowne Club and liaised with Anthony Sampson. The winner was Anna Swan for Statues without Shadows, a memoir of her parents, published by Sceptre in 2005.
In 2003 thirty-two proposals were short-listed on subjects which included the Hebridean traveller and author Martin Martin; the surgeon Sir Frederick Treves; the Chinese consular official Harold Harding; a joint portrait of W.B. Yeats, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein and Dorothy Parker; the author’s father who was Chesterfield’s longest serving Mayoral chauffeur; the children’s poet Kathleen Watkins; the tenor Richard Tauber; the mother of the statesman George Canning; the writer Alan Paton; the Columbian revolutionary Pedro Prestan; John Felton, who assassinated the Duke of Buckingham in 1628; the aircraft designer Horatio Barber; Sylvia Plath; the murderess Madeleine Smith; the Devon potter George Fishley; the female secretary of Nottingham Forrest Football Club; Billy Smart; the seventeenth-century cartographer John Ogilby, and the chimney-sweep James Seward.
This year the winner was less clear. Over lunch at Mon Plaisir, Mark Amory and Lucy Moore (with Sarah Bradford by email) narrowed the entries to six finalists – Sarah Baartman known as The Hottentot Venus; Anne of Hanover; Beatrice daughter of Queen Victoria (which Weidenfeld will publish in 2007); John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor; the wife of the Rajah Brooke of Sarawak; Mary, elder sister of Anne Boleyn and the Egyptologist Robert de Rustafjaell. The winner was the Guardian journalist Richard Adams for his joint portrait of John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor.
Twenty-nine entries were long-listed for the 2004 judges – Anna Swan, David Ellis and Anne Chisholm – including Elizabethan actor and dramatist Nathan Field; the Tudor poet George Gascoigne; physician and benefactor Sir Hans Sloane; the Scottish composer Cecil Coles; the martial arts champion Enoeda; Napoleonic rifleman John Kincaid; the film star Marie Dressler; cinema organist John Madin; a joint portrait of five female Victorian writers; the Italian writer Curzio Malaparte; Queen Anne’s Lord Chancellor Lord Harcourt; the Scottish Unitarian minister Thomas Palmer who was sent to Botany Bay; the journalist Filson Young; the children of P.B. Shelley and how they controlled the subsequent portrayal of both P.B. and Mary Shelley; a First World War subaltern; the comparative childhoods of seven American presidents; the artist and doctor John St John Long; the nightclub owner Gina Ware; the political hostess Lady Frances Waldegrave, and Cecil Rhodes.
In a strong field, a final short-list was drawn up of proposed lives of the lawyer Lord Mansfield; the Victorian artist Henrietta Ward and the early life of Robert Louis Stevenson. The only two to make all three judge’s short-list were Linda Porter’s proposal for a book on the circle around Napoleon,Josephine’s Enemies ,(though it was her life of Mary Tudor which became her first published book), and John Higgs’ proposed life of the counterculture icon Timothy Leary (subsequently sold in both the US and UK). Porter was declared winner with Higgs as runner-up.
For some reason in 2005, we had the lowest number of submissions ever – twelve – and the judges Robert Lacey, Caroline Moorehead and Miranda Seymour decided not to award the prize. This year, with former prize-winner and judge Anna Swan as the new administrator and judges HRH Princess Michael of Kent, Jeremy Lewis and Paul Laity of the London Review of Books, it is looking much healthier. With extensive coverage in the press and online we expect a record number of excellent entries but will have to wait until the Autumn to discover the latest winner of the Biographers’ Club Prize.
