Annal:2002 Whitbread Book Award for Biography
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Whitbread Book Award in the year 2002. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- Whitbread Book Award for Biography
- Nonfiction books
- Nonfiction authors
- Biography books
- Biography authors.
Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self
- 2002 Whitbread-Biography winner
- 2002 LATimes–Biography finalist
- Score: 16.52
For a decade, beginning in 1660, an ambitious young London civil servant kept an astonishingly candid account of his life during one of the most defining periods in British history. In Samuel Pepys, Claire Tomalin offers us a fully realized and richly nuanced portrait of this man, whose inadvertent masterpiece would establish him as the greatest diarist in the English language.
Against the backdrop of plague, civil war, and regicide, with John Milton composing diplomatic correspondence for Oliver Cromwell, Christopher Wren drawing up plans to rebuild…
- 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;…
- 2002 Whitbread-Biography shortlist
- Score: 6.52
In 1937 the Court Page of the London Times began publishing a series of articles featuring a charming, upper-middle class English housewife named Mrs Miniver. The articles depicted an idyllically happy family with three children, a house in London, and a country cottage called Starlings.
Two years later, Mrs Miniver was published in book form. While some critics derided the book as sentimental, many readers embraced it as a symbol of an increasingly endangered English way of life, and it went on to become the #1 bestseller in America. The Hollywood film,…
Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA
- 2002 LATimes–Sci/Tech winner
- 2002 Whitbread-Biography shortlist
- Score: 16.52
In March 1953, Maurice Wilkins of King’s College, London, announced the departure of his obstructive colleague Rosalind Franklin to rival Cavendish Laboratory scientist Francis Crick. But it was too late. Franklin’s unpublished data and crucial photograph of DNA had already been seen by her competitors at the Cambridge University lab. With the aid of these, plus their own knowledge, Watson and Crick discovered the structure of the molecule that genes are composed of—DNA, the secret of life. Five years later, at the age of thirty-seven, after more brilliant…
