Annal:2003 Whitbread Book Award for Biography

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Results of the Whitbread Book Award in the year 2003. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:

Orwell: The Life

D.J. Taylor

At last, a fresh, comprehensive biography of the twentieth century’s most emblematic writer

In the last fifty years, Animal Farm and 1984 have sold over forty million copies, and “Orwellian” is now a byword for a particular way of thinking about life, literature, and language. D. J. Taylor’s magisterial assessment cuts through George Orwell’s iconic status to reveal a bitter critic who concealed a profound totalitarian streak and whose progress through the literary world of the 1930s and 1940s was characterized by the myths he built around…

 

Margaret Thatcher: Volume 2. The Iron Lady

John Campbell

The first full study of the Thatcher Government from beginning to dramatic end—The Iron Lady is certain to become one of the greatest political biographies of our times.

Frank Johnson in the Daily Telegraph described the first volume of John Campbell’s biography of Margaret Thatcher as “much the best book yet written about Lady Thatcher.” That volume, The Grocer’s Daughter, described Mrs. Thatcher’s childhood and early career up until the 1979 General Election, which carried her into Downing Street. This second volume covers the whole…

 

Gellhorn: A Twentieth Century Life

Caroline Moorehead

The first major biography of legendary war correspondent Martha Gellhorn, whose life provides a unique and thrilling perspective on world history in an extraordinary time

Martha Gellhorn’s heroic career as a reporter brought her to the front lines of virtually every significant international conflict between the Spanish Civil War and the end of the Cold War. The preeminent-and often the only-female correspondent on the scene, she broke new ground for women in the male preserve of journalism. Her wartime dispatches, marked by a passionate desire to expose…

 

Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith

Andrew Wilson

The first and highly anticipated biography of the author of such classics of suspense as Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr. Ripley.

The life of Patricia Highsmith was as secretive and unusual as that of many of the best-known characters who people her “peerlessly disturbing” writing. Yet even as her work—her thrillers, short stories, and the pseudonymous lesbian novel The Price of Salt—have found new popularity in the last few years, the life of this famously elusive writer has remained a mystery.

For Beautiful Shadow, the…

 
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