Congratulations to Catherine Haig, who has won the £2,000 Tony Lothian Prize, for a proposal for an uncommissioned biography, for An Unfinished Life – Lady Gwendolen Cecil (1860–1945). Haig received the prize at the Biographers’ Club Christmas party, held at Albany, London.
Haig’s proposal is about Lord Salisbury’s second daughter, who took on the daunting task of writing his biography. Judge Catharine Morris said: “Meticulously prepared and engagingly written, Catherine Haig’s book An Unfinished Life – Lady Gwendolen Cecil not only shows us the woman behind a classic of political biography; it also brings us into her warm and endearing – perhaps inimitable – company.”
Morris, an editor at the TLS, was joined on the judging panel by Lindsay Duguid, former fiction editor at the TLS and a judge of the Duff Cooper Prize; and Dan Franklin, former publisher at Jonathan Cape.
Also shortlisted were Annette Rubery, for The Female Rake – Peg Woffington’s Scandalous Life on the Georgian Stage; and Tara McEvoy, for Padraic Fiacc: Poet of the Pagan City.
The prize is sponsored by Elizabeth, Duchess of Buccleuch, in memory of her mother.
Photo: Catherine Haig (centre) with Annette Rubery (left) and Tara McEvoy