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Last year's winning books
Comments by judges of the awards Professor Laura Marcus (biography) and Professor Colin Nicholson (fiction) on the winning books from last year's awards.
A Strange Eventful History: The Dramatic Lives of Ellen Terry, Henry Irving and their Remarkable Families
Written by Michael Holroyd.
Michael Holroyd's biographies of Lytton Strachey, Bernard Shaw and others have profoundly shaped the writing of biography in recent decades.
His most recent biographical work, A Strange Eventful History, traces, in elegant and eloquent prose, the interwoven lives of the great Victorian actors Ellen Terry and Henry Irving, and the theatrical dynasties of which they were a part and which they created.
The book brings alive the acting that so entranced the Victorians and Edwardians, recreating long-vanished gestures, movements and voices.
The Secret Scripture
Written by Sebastian Barry.
Asylum-bound Roseanne McNulty, born Clear, is approaching her hundredth birthday as she tells and conceals her shattered life to co-narrator, psychiatrist Dr Grene.
These two richly conceived characters warily negotiate each other's fate and lifeline in ways that disclose the impact of politics and prejudice on ordinary people.
The family as lived relationship and as metaphor threads its tortured way through the narrative, and connects with Barry's other fiction.
Although she pre-dates it, Roseanne comes to embody the 'terrible beauty' that Yeats saw born in the rising of 1916.
As Ireland's conflicted past shapes a difficult present, the agony of her relationships is both delivered and redeemed by a prose style that is seamlessly beguiling, effortlessly inventive and compulsively page-turning.
This article was published on Aug 11, 2010