Biographers' Club Prize (2010)

From Bio Newsletter accessed 9/3/10 and Biographers' Club Web Site.


The [London] Biographers' Club is renaming its annual prize the Tony Lothian Biographers' Club Prize after the late biographer. The £2,000 prize is awarded each year by the London-based organization to an uncommissioned first-time writer working on a biography.

The name change was prompted by a generous donation from the Lothian family. Antonella, Marchioness of Lothian, OBE (1922-2007)--always known as Tony--wrote a biography of her close friend Valentina Tereshkova (Valentina: The First Woman in Space). Lothian was also a current-affairs columnist on the Scottish Daily Express and a broadcaster and television presenter. In 1955, along with Odette Hallowes and Georgina Coleridge, she created the Woman of the Year Lunch, an event that continues to this day.

This year's judges will be Margaret Drabble, whose biographies include Arnold Bennett and Angus Wilson; Anne de Courcy, author of The Viceroy's Daughters and Snowdon: The Biography; and John Guy, whose books include Tudor England and My Heart Is My Own: The Life of Mary Queen of Scots.
The 2007 prize winner, Clare Mulley's The Woman Who Saved the Children: A Biography of Eglantyne Jebb, was released by Oneworld on April 24. All the book's royalties will be donated to the Save the Children Fund.

Previous winners of the Biographers’ Club Prize (now the Tony Lothian Biographers’ Club Prize) include:

Lucy Jago – The Northern Lights (Hamish Hamilton)
Adrian Fort – Prof: The Life and Times of Frederick Lindemann (Cape)
Adrienne Gavin – Dark Horse: A Life of Anna Sewell (The History Press)
Helen Smith – Midwife of Genius: Edward Garnett (forthcoming Cape)
Clare Mullley – The Woman Who Saved the Children: Eglantyne Jebb (Oneworld)
Anna Swan - whose Statues without Shadows (Sceptre) was shortlisted for the J.R. Ackerley Prize.

Several short-listed writers also went on to be published, including
Jessie Childs for Henry VIII’s Last Victim, won the Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography;
John Higgs’ I Have America Surrounded: The Life of Timothy Leary (Barricade Books);
Matthew Dennison’s The Last Princess (Orion);
Pauline Halford’s Storm Warning (Sutton);
Philip Eade’s Sylvia: Queen of the Headhunters (Orion).

2010
Biographies on the short list for the Best First Biography:
What to Look for in Winter: A Memoir of Blindness, by Candia McWilliam (Jonathan Cape)
Lesley Blanch: Inner Landscapes, Wilder Shores, by Anne Boston (John Murray)
Storyteller: The Authorised Biography of Roald Dahl, by Donald Sturrock (HarperPress)
E. M. Forster: A New Life, by Wendy Moffat (Bloomsbury)
Young Romantics: The Shelleys, Byron, and Other Tangled Lives, by Daisy Hay (Bloomsbury)
The Alan Clarke Diaries: The Biography, by Ion Trewin (Wiedenfeld & Nicholson)