Annal:2008 Costa Book Award for Biography

Somewhere Towards the End: A Memoir

Diana Athill

• 2008 Costa-Biography winner
• Score: 10.58

Diana Athill is one of the great editors in British publishing. For more than five decades she edited the likes of V. S. Naipaul and Jean Rhys, for whom she was a confidante and caretaker. As a writer, Diana Athill has made her reputation for the frankness and precisely expressed wisdom of her memoirs. Now in her ninety-first year, “entirely untamed about both old and new conventions” (Literary Review) and freed from any of the inhibitions that even she may have once had, Athill reflects candidly, and sometimes with great humor, on the condition of being old—the losses and occasionally the gains that age brings, the wisdom and fortitude required to face death. Distinguished by “remarkable intelligence…[and the] easy elegance of her prose” (Daily Telegraph), this short, well-crafted book, hailed as “a virtuoso exercise” (Sunday Telegraph) presents an inspiring work for those hoping to flourish in their later years.

Bloomsbury Ballerina: Lydia Lopokova, Imperial Dancer and Mrs John Maynard Keynes

Judith Mackrell

• 2008 Costa-Biography shortlist
• Score: 6.58

Vivacious and charming, ballerina Lydia Lopokova leapt to the height of fame with Diaghilev’s legendary Ballets Russes. Then, a surprising marriage to renowned economist (and former homosexual) John Maynard Keynes catapulted her into an entirely different universe. Her extraordinary story is told here for the first time: it links the world of ballet with the Bloomsbury group—including such remarkable individuals as Nijinsky, Picasso, Stravinsky, and Virginia Woolf—and spans the past century’s most dramatic social, political, and cultural upheavals. Quoting from many of Lydia’s own writings, Judith Mackrell captures her intensely captivating, eccentric, and irreverent personality…and claims her as a major character in both dance and world history.

Chagall: A Biography

Jackie Wullschlager

• 2008 Costa-Biography shortlist
• Score: 6.58

"When Matisse dies, Chagall will be the only painter left who understands what colour really is.”

Picasso said this in the 1950s, when he and Chagall were eminent neighbours living in splendour on the Cote d’Azur. Born the son of a Russian Jewish herring merchant, Chagall fled the repressive “potato-coloured” czarist empire in 1911 to develop his genius in Paris. Through war and revolution in Bolshevik Russia, Weimar Berlin, occupied France and 1940s New York, he gave form to his dreams, longings and memories in paintings which are among the most humane and joyful of the 20th century.

Wullschlager has had exclusive access to hundreds of hitherto unseen and unpublished letters from the Chagall family collection in Paris, lending Chagall’s own unique voice to this account. Drawing also on numerous interviews with the artist’s family, friends, dealers, collectors, and illustrated with two hundred paintings, drawings and photographs, this elegantly written biography gives for the first time a full and true account of Chagall the man and the artist—and of a life as intense, theatrical and haunting as his paintings.

If You Don't Know Me By Now: A Memoir of Love, Secrets and Lies in Wolverhampton

Sathnam Sanghera

• 2008 Costa-Biography shortlist
• Score: 6.58

“Stop laughing so much. You’ll only cry twice as much later”, my mother says. Mum is never more anxious than at a celebration, hovering around us with red chillies to frighten away evil spirits. I hate that I’ve inherited this attitude: sometimes I can feel the end of good things before I’ve even had a chance to enjoy them. But finally I understand why my mother was so fond of the phrase: that’s how life was for her. For years, for every one shot of happy, there would be two shots of sad.

From Hindu hairdressers to the Wolverhampton tourist office, from terrifying violence to boundless family loyalty, If You Don’t Know Me by Now is a heart-rending account of one family’s unimaginable suffering and also its great capacity for love. In a voice that is by turns tender and wonderfully funny, Sathnam Sanghera tells a story of the seemingly unbridgeable, and often harrowing, gulf between classes, cultures and generations and also provides a moving testament to the surprising power of unconditional love.