The Biographers’ Club is delighted to announce that the winner of the Elizabeth Buccleuch Prize 2024 is Mark Nayler for his proposal ‘The Popular Philosopher: A Life of Bryan Magee’. His victory was announced at the Biographers’ Club Christmas Party, held in Albany, Piccadilly, on 11th December.
Out of a strong and varied shortlist of six, the judges chose Mark Nayler’s sympathetic and nuanced treatment of the extraordinary life and many faces of Bryan Magee, one of Britain’s best-known philosophers as well as a novelist, journalist, TV and radio presenter, arts critic and Labour MP. Growing up between the wars in the gas-lit Cockney streets of Hoxton, London’s worst slum, was an unlikely start in life for a man of Magee’s intellectual firepower, and he was indeed someone riven with contradictions, for whom the puzzles of human existence were personal, while he brought them to the attention of millions.
Nayler’s proposal was considered by the judges to be ‘entertaining as well as informative, with a persuasive assessment of Magee’s personal achievements as well as a retrospective on his 20th-century fame’.
The prize awards £2,000 to the best proposal for an uncommissioned first biography, and is generously sponsored by the Duke of Buccleuch in memory of his late wife Elizabeth, Duchess of Buccleuch (1954-2023).
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