The 2019 Tony Lothian Prize has gone to Tom Seymour Evans for The Canyons – Six British Exiles, Los Angeles and the Counterculture. Seymour Evans received the £2,000 prize at the Biographers’ Club Christmas Party at Albany.
The Tony Lothian Prize, sponsored by the Duchess of Buccleuch in memory of her mother Tony Lothian, is for a proposal by a first-time biographer. Recent winners have included Sarah Watling, whose Noble Savages came out from Cape earlier this year, and Francesca Wade, whose Square Haunting is due from Faber in January. Agents and publishers have already shown interest in Seymour Evans’ work.
The Canyons is about six pacifists – among them the writers Aldous Huxley, Dodie Smith, and Christopher Isherwood – who fled Britain for Los Angeles before the Second World War. The book was, the judges said, “a thrilling story of political and sexual dissent”, with Seymour Evans showing “how ideas rooted in the 19th century morphed into urgent experiments in the counterculture, in a landscape populated by visionaries, charlatans, filmmakers, communists, pornographers, rogue psychiatrists, FBI agents and mystics”.
Also shortlisted were proposals by Emma Bielecki, JS Casey, Jay Prosser, Jon Stadolnik, and Lois K Yorke.
Reviewer and broadcaster Alex Clark, former TLS fiction editor Lindsay Duguid, and the TLS’ Catharine Morris were the judges.
Photo: Tom Seymour Evans and Catharine Morris