Annal:2005 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Biography
From AwardAnnals
Results of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in the year 2005. 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.
Edvard Munch: Behind the Scream
- 2005 JT Black-Biography winner
- Score: 10.55
Although almost everyone recognizes Edvard Munch’s famous painting The Scream, hardly anyone knows much about the man. What kind of person could have created this universal image, one that so vividly expressed all the uncertainties of the twentieth century? What kind of experiences did he have? In this book, the first comprehensive biography of Edvard Munch in English, Sue Prideaux brings the artist fully to life. Combining a scholar’s precision with a novelist’s insight, she explores the events of his turbulent life and unerringly places his experiences in their intellectual, emotional, and spiritual contexts.
With unlimited access to tens of thousands of Munch’s papers, including his letters and diaries, Prideaux offers a portrait of the artist that is both intimate and moving. Munch sought to paint what he experienced rather than what he saw, and as his life often veered out of control, his experiences were painful. Yet he painted throughout his long life, creating strange and dramatic works in which hysteria and violence lie barely concealed beneath the surface. An extraordinary…
Haw-Haw: The Tragedy of William and Margaret Joyce
- 2005 JT Black-Biography shortlist
- 2005 Whitbread-Biography shortlist
- Score: 12.55
William and Margaret Joyce—Lord and Lady Haw-Haw—became one of the most mythologized, feared, and ridiculed partnerships of the Second World War. His “Germany Calling” broadcasts delivered in an upper-class drawl, and her more feminine pro-Nazi wireless talks, were part of the very fabric of the Home Front. Yet when they were captured in May 1945, only he was charged with high treason.
Authorized by William Joyces daughter and based on new interviews and previously unpublished archives, Haw-Haw is the meticulously researched and vividly written biography that traces William and Margarets relationship from the rise of the fascist movement in the East End of London through to war-torn Berlin; intrigue, hubris, alcoholism, infidelity following them along the way.
Siegfried Sassoon: A Life
- 2005 JT Black-Biography shortlist
- Score: 6.55
Siegfried Sassoon was born in 1886 in Kent, and began writing verses as a boy. While a brave young officer, he confronted the terrible realities of the First World War on the battlefield, in verse, and, finally, by announcing his opposition to the war in 1917, showing that physical courage could exist alongside humanity and sensibility.
In 1918, Sassoon found himself one of the most famous young writers of the time, a mentor to Wilfred Owen, and admired by Winston Churchill and T.E. Lawrence. He joined the Labour Party, became literary editor of the socialist Daily Herald, and began close friendships with Thomas Hardy and E.M. Forster, while trying to adapt his poetry to peacetime. Then Sassoon fell in love with the artistocratic aesthete Stephen Tennant, who led him into his group of Bright Young Things who inspired the early novels of Evelyn Waugh. At the demise of his passionate and fraught relationship with Tennant, Sassoon suddenly married the beautiful Hester Gatty in 1933 and retreated to a quiet country life until their eventual estrangement and Sassoon’s subsequent conversion…
The Pursuit of Victory: The Life and Achievement of Horatio Nelson
- 2005 JT Black-Biography shortlist
- Score: 6.55
A dazzling biography that is destined to be the definitive account of Horatio Nelson’s life for generations
How did Horatio Nelson achieve such extraordinary success? In this authoritative biography, the eminent scholar Roger Knight places him firmly in the context of the Royal Navy of the time. Nelson was passionate and relentless from the outset of his career; his charisma and his coolness in battle are legendary. But his success depended also on the strength of intelligence available to him, the quality of the ships he commanded, the potency of his guns, and the skill of his seamen.
Based on a vast array of new sources, this biography demolishes many of the myths that have for two centuries surrounded Nelson. Knight demonstrates that this great Romantic hero was in his time a shrewd political operator and often a difficult subordinate. He was occasionally na•ve, often impatient, and only happy when completely in command.
Readers will emerge from this biography with a greatly enriched understanding of this singular man-one who was brilliant, severely flawed, and never to be crossed.
Stuart: A Life Backwards
- 2006 NBCC–Autobiography finalist
- 2005 JT Black-Biography shortlist
- 2005 Whitbread-Biography shortlist
- Score: 18.56
Stuart, A Life Backwards, is the story of a remarkable friendship between a reclusive writer and illustrator (a middle class scum ponce, if you want to be honest about it, Alexander) and a chaotic, knife-wielding beggar whom he gets to know during a campaign to release two charity workers from prison. Interwoven into this is Stuart’s confession: the story of his life, told backwards.
With humour, compassion (and exasperation) Masters slowly works back through post-office heists, prison riots and the exact day Stuart discovered violence, to unfold the reasons why he changed from a happy-go-lucky little boy into a polydrug-addicted-alcoholic Jekyll and Hyde personality, with a fondness for what he called “little strips of silver” (knives to you and me). Funny, despairing, brilliantly written and full of surprises: this is the most original and moving biography of recent years.
Voltaire Almighty: A Life in Pursuit of Freedom
- 2005 JT Black-Biography shortlist
- Score: 6.55
With its tales of illegitimacy, prison, stardom, exile, love affairs, and tireless battles against his critics, priests and king, Roger Pearson’s Voltaire Almighty brings the father of Enlightenment to vivid life.
Voltaire Almighty provides a lively look at the life and thought of one of the major forces behind European Enlightenment. A rebel from start to finish (1694-1778), Voltaire was an ailing and unwanted bastard child who refused to die; and when he did consent to expire some eighty-four years later, he secured a Christian burial despite a bishop’s ban.
During much of his life Voltaire was the toast of society for his plays and verse, but his barbed wit and commitment to human reason got him into trouble. Jailed twice and eventually banished by the king, he was an outspoken critic of religious intolerance and persecution. His personal life was as colorful as his intellectual life. Of independent means and mind, Voltaire never married, but he had long-term affairs with two women: Emilie, who died after giving birth to the child of another lover, and his niece, Marie-Louise,…
