Gallery

Winner of the £2,000 Best First Biography – Roland Chambers for The Last Englishman: the Double Life of Arthur Ransome (Faber).
Swallows and Amazons and its sequels established Ransome’s reputation as a champion of old-world values in the final days of the British Empire. Between 1917 and 1924, as Russian correspondent for the Daily News and the Manchester Guardian, he was an uncritical apologist for the Bolshevik regime. No English journalist was considered more controversial or more damaging to British security. Yet he offered his services to the British government, both as unofficial diplomat and spy. Recruited to MI6 in 1918, he submitted reports to the British head of station in Eastern Europe, while simultaneously advising the Bolshevik secret police on British foreign policy. Roland Chambers explores Ransome’s career as a struggling writer in Edwardian London, his disastrous first marriage and flight to Russia and his remarkable high-wire act as British agent and 'mouthpiece of the Bolsheviki'. Ransome’s triumph was to erase the entire episode from the public consciousness, just as he erased all uncomfortable episodes, including his deeply troubled relationship with his daughter. This is an absorbing and chilling examination of an English gentleman and his particular world.

The shortlisted entrants were:

The Magnificent Mrs Tennant by David Waller (Yale University Press) [runner-up]
Dear Fatty by Dawn French (Cornerstone/Random House)
This is Not About Me by Janice Galloway (Granta)
Love Child by Allegra Huston (Bloomsbury)
Mary Tudor by Anna Whitelock (Bloomsbury)

The judges were: Philip Ziegler, Rebecca Fraser and Brian MacArthur.

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Winner of the Tony Lothian Prize – Harriet Tuckey for The Forgotten Hero of Everest.

The £2,000 Tony Lothian Biographers’ Club Prize (sponsored by her daughter, Elizabeth, Duchess of Buccleuch), supports uncommissioned first-time writers working on a biography. The judges were Margaret Drabble, Anne de Courcy and John Guy.

Harriet Tuckey: The Forgotten Hero of Everest
Dr Griffith Pugh was one of the ‘fathers of altitude medicine’, a self-trained physiologist and, according to many experts, the most significant member of the 1953 Everest team. History, however, has mostly erased his role in the conquest of the world’s highest mountain. This book uncovers his previously unacknowledged contribution to the expedition’s success: without Pugh’s rigorous and ground-breaking regimen, it would have failed, like so many before it. His scientific procedures still stand today. Harriet Tuckey brings her father’s story to life with telling details, extensive research and interviews with the inner circle, including Sir Edmund Hillary and the travel writer Jan Morris, who was a member of the 1953 team. Genius has its price, and the insights into a turbulent father/daughter relationship reveal the mind of an eccentric anti-establishment figure. The Forgotten Hero of Everest is a major contribution to the genre known as ‘fridge lit’. Harriet Tuckey is an art historian and former civil servant.

The shortlisted entrants were:

Jean Buchanan: 'To Catch a Thief'

A charming and quirky exploration of a 1950s film classic, this book promises a behind-the-scenes exposé of the film’s genesis and central players (author David Dodge, Alfred Hitchcock, Grace Kelly and Cary Grant, among many others), alongside an illuminating study of its glamorous Riviera backdrop and enduring influence. Jean Buchanan is a freelance writer for television and researches part-time for the Oxford Dictionaries of Quotations. 

Anthony Massey: 'Apostle of the South Seas' [John Williams]

This is one of those true stories that if it were fiction the reader would be left thinking ‘This could never happen in real life.’ Yet it did. Anthony Massey’s ancestor the Reverend John Williams was a celebrity missionary, at the time as famous as David Livingstone, whose extraordinary adventures in the South Pacific ended with his gruesome and very public murder in 1839. A fascinating life and a cracking story engagingly told. Anthony Massey is a BBC news journalist. 

Louise Miller: 'A Fine Brother' [Flora Sandes]

Flora Sandes (1876-1956) was a feminist icon long before the term was coined.  A decorated Captain in the Serbian Army during the First World War, she made headline news across Britain when she was severely wounded in hand-to-hand combat in 1916. An intrepid thrill-seeker with a taste for cigarettes, alcohol and fast cars, she later married a White Russian Colonel. Her colourful life is revealed in vibrant prose as she travels the world in search of adventure, fighting the Bulgarians in the First World War, the Nazis in the Second, surviving epidemic disease and imprisonment by the Gestapo. The title comes from an injured enemy soldier she rescued who hailed her as a ‘fine brother’. Louise Miller studied politics and law and now works in internet sharedealing. 

Linda Randall: 'Fair Maid of Perth' [Effie Gray]

The women of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood were as radical and influential as the artists they posed for. Effie Gray was a vital figure in 19th-century artistic circles, ostracised from polite society after the annulment of her unhappy and sexless first marriage to John Ruskin; the following year she married John Millais, founding member of the Brotherhood. Linda Randall unravels the rich material of Effie’s life as model, muse and later manager of her second husband’s career. Effie Gray has featured in countless drama productions, from a 1912 silent film to the recent TV series Desperate Romantics. ‘Fair Maid of Perth’ is a timely investigation into this Victorian love triangle and the striking contrast between Effie’s two marriages. Linda Randall teaches modern languages and recently completed an MA in Life-Writing at UEA. 

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This year’s Master of Ceremonies was the broadcaster and journalist James Naughtie, a consummate professional whose charm and expertise ensured that proceedings ran smoothly and on schedule.

Our after-dinner speaker was Amanda Foreman, author of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire and the forthcoming A World on Fire. Her speech touched a raw nerve or two, most notably in its appeal for publishers to take risks and ‘trust biographers and allow them the artistic freedom to be original and innovative. We write with our heads and our hearts. It is our duty to be iconoclastic ­– biographers can’t be team players. The reason why people still read biographies – why we still have a viable market and readership – is not because the genre has stayed the same but because it has the capability to continually re-invent itself. This year, of all years, is surely the best proof of this. The range of biographies is broader than ever, and it is the outliers, such as Michael Holroyd’s A Strange Eventful History, that have garnered the spotlight. He has demonstrated in the best possible way that there is room on the shelf for all kinds of approaches and methods. What sells is the ‘real thing’ . . . a book which embodies the ideals of our genre: innovation, exploration, authenticity and artistry.’

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Among the other 145 guests at Banqueting House were Kate Adie, Valerie Grove, Alexandra Pringle, Michael Fishwick, Margaret Drabble, Philip Ziegler, Anne Chisholm, John Guy, John Walsh, Artemis Cooper, Michael Prodger, Brenda Maddox, Anne Sebba, Michael Leapman, Alan Samson, Marianne Vellmans, Paul Sidey and the Duke and Duchess of Buccleuch.

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Contact: Prize Administrator, Anna Swan, +44(0)20 8452 4993, anna@annaswan.co.uk
www.biographersclub.co.uk