The Biographers’ Club is delighted to announce the winner of the 2021 £2,000 Tony Lothian Prize (sponsored by her daughter, Elizabeth, Duchess of Buccleuch) for the best uncommissioned proposal by a first-time biographer.
The judges, Lindsay Duguid, Dan Franklin and Catharine Morris, have awarded the 2021 prize to Sarah Harkness for Alexander Macmillan, Advocate for the Ignorant – The Life and Times of a Victorian Publisher.
2018 marked the 175th anniversary of the House of Macmillan, a major international publishing business founded by a man born in poverty in Ayrshire with only a rudimentary education. How did Alexander Macmillan build so much from such slim advantages? His career illustrates perfectly the pillars of the Victorian character: business acumen matched by fierce ambition, intellectual enquiry informing social philanthropy, mingled with strong devotion to family life. He counted the greatest intellects of the age among his friends and authors, Tennyson, Carlisle, Gladstone, Arnold and Hardy among them. Sarah Harkness evokes a warm-hearted, amusing yet driven man whose influence was immense, promoting women authors, popularising the classics and spreading radical ideas across the middle classes and into mass culture.
The judges comment: ‘Alexander Macmillan was the father of a dynasty, the founder of a successful publishing firm and a friend to literary giants. Sarah Harkness’s sympathetic account of his humble origins and later successes skilfully captures familiar names from an unfamiliar angle.’
The Tony Lothian Prize has a strong record of showcasing new talent. The 2015 winner, Francesca Wade’s Square Haunting , was published to wide acclaim by Faber, and Sarah Watling’s Noble Savages (2016)by Jonathan Cape; John Woolf’s Queen Victoria’s Freaks was signed by Michael O’Mara Books, and the 2020 prize winner Kate Crehan’s But Will it Get a Laugh? The Life of Doris Hare in Three Acts will be published by the Society of Theatre Research.
For further information please contact [email protected], or [email protected], or see https://thebiographersclub.com/the-tony-lothian-prize.