The Tony Lothian Prize, for the best proposal by a first time biographer, has been renamed the Elizabeth Buccleuch Prize. 

The change follows the death last year of the Duchess of Buccleuch, who founded the prize in memory of her mother, Antonella (“Tony”) Lothian. The Duke of Buccleuch is continuing to support the £2,000 prize in his late wife’s memory.

The club will launch the 2024 prize in April.

The 2023 Winner is: Andrew Kenrick

Andrew Kenrick: Juba – From Roman Slave to African King

Kenrick tells the astonishing story of the Berber Prince Juba II (52BC–AD23), whose father was killed by Julius Caesar during the Roman conquest of North Africa in 46BC. Raised by Octavian – now Emperor Augustus – he was given the Kingdom of Mauretania (modern-day Morocco and Algeria) to rule in the name of Rome. This he did not by tyranny but with a liberal and civilising hand. Juba was a famed antiquarian, travel writer and explorer; he discovered the Canary Islands, wrote histories of Arabia and Libya, and led diplomatic missions to fellow rulers.

He had married Cleopatra Selene, daughter of Antony and Cleopatra, and took her to Mauretania be his queen; their son Ptolemy would meet a bloody end in the arena at Lyon, murdered by his cousin, the mad emperor Caligula, and his kingdom would be re-annexed by Rome.

Kenrick tells the story of this kingdom through the artefacts that Juba acquired, as an avid collector and patron. Thus, he throws light on a corner of the ancient African-Roman world hitherto and regrettably shrouded in shadow. 

The Shortlist for the 2023 Prize

Victoria Baena: A Sentimental Education – Amélie Bosquet, Gustave Flaubert, and the Writer’s Vocation in Nineteenth-Century France

A Sentimental Education draws on original archival research to tell the story of Amélie Bosquet, novelist, early feminist and close friend and correspondent of Gustave Flaubert, to whom he is thought to have said, ‘Madame Bovary, c’est moi’. The two writers from Normandy had much in common – both were from Rouen, neither married or had children, despite varied love affairs  – but their vocation as writers was very different. Flaubert believed in the writer’s almost God-like impersonality, ‘everywhere present and nowhere visible’, while Bosquet thought that a writer should use her work to illuminate injustice and spark social change. Their ideas played out in a lively, flirtatious ten-year correspondence, Flaubert treating Bosquet as his protégée, until her Parisian life politicised her and stiffened her search for independence, resulting in an irreconcilable rift.

Baena leads us into the heart of this complex creative relationship, translating Bosquet’s letters for the first time, against the background of the waning years of France’s Second Empire.

 

 Stephanie Genty: Bitter Strength – The Life and Work of Marilyn French, Feminist

Marilyn French distilled the rage of a whole generation of women in her bestselling novel The Women’s Room, which almost single-handedly brought the feminist movement to mainstream America. It sold 7 million copies in the US and 21 million worldwide, inspired women to take their  lives into their own hands, and influenced the way we think about gender. Yet there has never been a biography of Marilyn French until this one, the fruit of thirty years of research.

It traces the making of a writer from the troubled circumstances of her birth to her turbulent marriage and divorce, her pivotal Harvard years and political awakening, and the intoxicating life of an internationally known, bestselling author until interrupted by cancer, which she survived but which once again changed her priorities and outlook on life. From suburban housewife to feminist icon, Genty traces French’s remarkable path with acuity and style.

Sue Laurence: Ada Chesterton – Fleet Street Bohemian and Adventurer

A first biography of a pioneering journalist, campaigner and adventuress, a remarkable figure who straddled the worlds of Fleet Street and bohemia in the Edwardian age. Sister-in-law of G.K. Chesterton, she reported back from the trenches during WW1 and from Poland after the war, before returning home to engage with the plight of working-class women. She campaigned for the rights of mothers, and went underground disguised as a rough sleeper to report on homelessness among single women, an experience that almost broke even her trenchant spirit. In 1926 a book of her articles was published, a national conversation ensued, and a fund was set up to finance her treasured project, Cecil Houses for homeless women, which exist in altered form to this day.

Throughout the 1930s she visited the Soviet Union, writing about the poverty and hunger that she found there, though she never lost faith in the Soviet regime; her visits to the Far East revealed the shocking extent of child slavery. She continued reporting on iniquities to the end of her extraordinarily adventurous life, and has finally found a worthy biographer.

Andrew Moscrop: Upriver, after Fred: A Thames Journey

This is a journey upriver and through the archives in search of the elusive early-20th-century Thames historian Frederick Samuel Thacker, author of four immersive books about the Thames and its tributaries that are, unaccountably, out of print. In them he evokes a lost riverine world of lock-keepers, millers, navigators and watermen; ruined canals and remote railway stations, policemen on bicycles and one-eyed rustics; and the chronology, construction and management of those all-important locks.

Moscrop follows in Thacker’s wake, travelling up the Thames by boat, and attempting to prise details of Thacker’s life and obsessions from the scenes that he observed and commented on a century ago. Part Quest for Corvo, part Into the Wild, this is also a biography of place, and of nature, and of a world and a man that are part known, part forgotten.

Matthew Zipf: Renata Adler – At the Radical Middle

Written with personal knowledge of its subject, this study of Renata Adler, journalist, author and film critic, pulls a single thread – that of a literary writer engaging deeply with civil rights – from the apparent randomness of Adler’s life. She came to America as an infant on a luxury liner, in company with the family’s Steinway grand, as daughter of a Jewish family fleeing the Nazis. What was her path from rural Connecticut to journalist at The New Yorker by the age of 25? She was a prodigy, a contrarian, an obsessive stylist, a reporter on the civil rights movement, on Vietnam and the Six Day War, on Bush v. Gore, and speechwriter for the House impeachment inquiry into Richard Nixon.

She moved in glamorous circles, was photographed by Richard Avedon and Irving Penn, got involved in literary spats that often overshadowed her more serious work. Yet Matthew Zipf never loses sight of her calling: to understand and defend the law as a civic ideal to hold the barbarians at bay.

Judges

  • Lindsay Duguid– critic and former editor at the TLS
  • Dan Franklin– former publisher at Jonathan Cape
  • Catharine Morris – Associate Editor at the TLS specialising in the fields of biography and history

Many of the shortlisted writers (as well as winners, below) have gone on to find agents and publishers

2023 // Andrew Kenrick: Juba – From Roman Slave to African King

2022 //Catherine Haig: An Unfinished Life – Lady Gwendolen Cecil (1860–1945)

2021 //Sarah Harkness: Alexander Macmillan, Advocate for the Ignorant – The Life and Times of a Victorian Publisher (to be published by Macmillan)

2020 // Kate Crehan: But Will it Get a Laugh? The Life of Doris Hare in Three Acts (published by the Society for Theatre Research)

2019 // Tom Seymour Evans: The Canyons – Six British Exiles, Los Angeles and the Counterculture

2018 // Harriet Baker for Rural Hours: Interwar Female Writers, Landscape and Living

2017 // John Woolf for Queen Victoria’s Freaks – The Performers at Buckingham Palace (published in autumn 2018 by Michael O’Mara Books as Peerless Prodigies: Freaks, Circuses and the extraordinary World of P.T. Barnum)

2016 // Sarah Watling for Noble Savages (published by Jonathan Cape, May 2019)

2015 //Francesca Wade for Square Haunting (published by Faber, 2020) 

2014 // Polly Clark for Thank You So Much for Writing

2013 // Elaine Thornton for Amalia Beer: A Prussian-Jewish Life

2012 // Jane Willis for Marguerite, Byron and the Literary Factory

2011 // Jane Gordon-Cumming for The American Heiress and the Scottish Rake: The True Story of the Royal Baccarat Scandal

2010 // Matt Cox for White Lies, Black Magic: Prince Monolulu

 

The 2023 Tony Lothian Prize 

Annual Deadline

Friday 13 October 2023

Entry Fee

Please download the Entry Form below and enclose it with your proposal and the fee of £15 . If you wish to pay by bank draft please email [email protected] for Biographers’ Club bank details . 

Requirements
  • Proposals of no more than 20 pages (unbound), including synopsis, 10-page sample chapter (double-spaced, numbered pages), CV and note on the market for the book and competing literature, by post to: Ariane Bankes, E6 Albany, Piccadilly, London W1J 0AR. Enquiries: 07985 920341
  • You can apply by emailing [email protected] and we will send you the form that you need to fill in. (sign and send by post with £15 fee and submission to the Prize Administrator at the above address)

Only the shortlisted entrants will be contacted

Entry Form

The Tony Lothian Prize