Annal:2002 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Biography
From AwardAnnals
Results of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in the year 2002. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Biography
- Nonfiction books
- Nonfiction authors
- Biography books
- Biography authors.
The Lunar Men: The Friends Who Made the Future
- 2002 JT Black-Biography winner
- Score: 10.52
In the 1760s a group of amateur experimenters met and made friends in the English Midlands. Most came from humble families, all lived far from the center of things, but they were young and their optimism was boundless: together they would change the world. Among them were the ambitious toymaker Matthew Boulton and his partner James Watt, of steam-engine fame; the potter Josiah Wedgwood; the larger-than-life Erasmus Darwin, physician, poet, inventor, and theorist of evolution (a forerunner of his grandson Charles). Later came Joseph Priestley, discoverer of oxygen…
- 2002 Dagger-Nonfiction shortlist
- 2002 JT Black-Biography shortlist
- 2002 Whitbread-Biography shortlist
- Score: 18.52
Once an untouchable member of England’s establishment—a world-famous art historian and a man knighted by the Queen of England—in a single stroke Anthony Blunt became an object of universal hatred when, in 1979, Margaret Thatcher exposed him as a Soviet spy.
In Anthony Blunt: His Lives, Miranda Carter shows how one man lived out opposing trends of his century—first as a rebel against his class, then as its epitome—and yet embodied a deeper paradox. In the 1920s, Blunt was a member of the Bloomsbury circle; in the 1930s he was a left-wing intellectual;…
Silvertown: An East End Family Memoir
- 2002 JT Black-Biography shortlist
- Score: 6.52
Silvertown is the story of the life of author Melanie McGrath’s grandmother, Jenny Page. As McGrath acknowledges, “It was the kind of life that could have belonged to a thousand women living in the mid years of the twentieth century in the East End of London. Except that it didn’t. It belonged to Jenny”. McGrath’s achievement in the book is to make Jenny’s very commonplace, circumscribed life not only believable and moving but also to turn it into a mirror in which the reader can see the changes that the century visited upon the East End. When Jenny was a…
Becoming George: The Life of Mrs W.B. Yeats
- 2002 JT Black-Biography shortlist
- Score: 6.52
Ann Saddlemyer’s biography of W. B. Yeats’s wife, George, portrays an extraordinarily talented, intelligent, and self-effacing woman, whose creative influence has never before been fully understood. She was wife and manager of a famous poet, and mother to his children, but in her own right also an inspired visionary and a practical woman of the arts.
Georgie Hyde Lees was raised in London’s literary salons, where arts, anthroposophy and the occult met. An accomplished linguist, art student and literary scholar, she married W. B. Yeats when she was 25, and he…
Flaubert: A Life
- 2002 JT Black-Biography shortlist
- 2001 Whitbread-Biography shortlist
- Score: 12.52
A blond giant of a man with green eyes and a resonant actor’s voice, Gustave Flaubert, perhaps the finest French writer of the nineteenth century, lived quietly in the provinces with his widowed mother, composing his incomparable novels at a rate of five words an hour. He detested his respectable neighbors, and they, in turn, helped to ensure his infamy as a writer of immoral books. Geoffrey Wall’s remarkable new biography weaves together the inner dramas of Flaubert’s provincial life with the social intrigues of his regular escapes to Paris, where he became a…
