Annal:2005 Whitbread Book Award for Biography
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Whitbread Book Award in the year 2005. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- Whitbread Book Award for Biography
- Nonfiction books
- Nonfiction authors
- Biography books
- Biography authors.
Matisse the Master: Volume 2. The Conquest of Colour: 1909-1954
- 2005 LATimes–Biography winner
- 2005 Whitbread-Biography winner
- Score: 20.55
“If my story were ever to be written down truthfully from start to finish, it would amaze everyone,” wrote Henri Matisse. It is hard to believe today that Matisse, whose exhibitions draw huge crowds worldwide, was once almost universally reviled and ridiculed. His response was neither to protest nor to retreat; he simply pushed on from one innovation to the next, and left the world to draw its own conclusions. Unfortunately, these were generally false and often damaging. Throughout his life and afterward people fantasized about his models and circulated baseless fabrications about his private life.
Fifty years after his death, Matisse the Master (the second half of the biography that began with the acclaimed The Unknown Matisse) shows us the painter as he saw himself. With unprecedented and unrestricted access to his voluminous family correspondence, and other new material in private archives, Hilary Spurling documents a lifetime of desperation and self-doubt exacerbated by Matisse’s attempts to counteract the violence and disruption of the twentieth century in paintings…
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Authorized by William Joyces daughter and based on new interviews and previously unpublished archives, Haw-Haw is the meticulously researched and vividly written biography that traces William and Margarets relationship from the rise of the fascist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.
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.
- 2005 Whitbread-Biography shortlist
- Score: 6.55
In the last year of the old millennium, Richard Mabey, Britain’s foremost nature writer, fell into a severe depression. For two years,he did little more than lie in bed with his face to a wall. He could neither work nor play. His money ran out. Worst of all, the natural world—which since childhood had been a source of joy and inspiration for him—became meaningless. Then, cared for by friends, he gradually recovered. He fell in love. Out of necessity as much as choice he moved to East Anglia. And he started to write again.
This remarkable book is an account of that first year of a new life. It is the story of a rite of passage—from sickness into health, from retreat into curiosity. It is about the adventure of learning to fit again. Having left the cosseting woods of the Chiltern hills for the open flatlands of Norfolk, Richard Mabey finds exhilaration in discovering a whole new landscape. He writes about the changing seasons in prose so exact and so beautiful, that every sentence delights the reader. But Nature Cure is also a larger story. In finding his own niche, Richard…
