Haig, McEvoy and Rubery shortlisted for £2,000 Tony Lothian Prize 

Catherine Haig, Tara McEvoy and Annette Rubery have been shortlisted for the £2,000 Tony Lothian Prize for an uncommissioned proposal by a first-time biographer, sponsored by Elizabeth, Duchess of Buccleuch.

The prize, won last year by Sarah Harkness for her "sympathetic" biography proposal Alexander Macmillan, Advocate for the Ignorant—The Life and Times of a Victorian Publisher, will be awarded at the Biographers’ Club Christmas party on Tuesday 6th December.

Catherine Haig’s shortlisted An Unfinished Life: Lady Gwendolyn Cecil (1860–1945) tells the story of the second and “cleverest” daughter of Lord Salisbury, who served as Britain’s Prime Minister three times.

The synopsis continues: “On his death in 1903, she was the one to take on the writing of his life, despite her minimal education and unpreparedness. Four decades, four volumes and 4,000 words later, the result was a magisterial biography, its final volume still unfinished at the time of her death.

“This despite the almost constant demands of her wider family, and the challenges of research and writing to one wholly untrained for such an ambitious project. She was eccentric, compassionate, astute, opinionated, funny and delightful, brought up happily at Hatfield House amid a wide circle of the most eminent men of the day, but she and her sister Maud were destined for a very different future from her well-educated brothers.”

The judging panel—comprising Lindsay Duguid, former fiction editor at the TLS and a judge of the Duff Cooper Prize; Dan Franklin, former publisher at Jonathan Cape; and Catharine Morris, who works at the TLS in the fields of biography, memoir, travel, bibliography and language—said the proposal “teases what it took to write such an impressive biography in those circumstances and how Gwendoline’s life, character and opinions shaped the work she produced.”

Also up for the prize is Tara McEvoy for Padraic Fiacc: Poet of the Pagan City, which takes Padraic Fiacc, “now sadly marginalised, but whose work retains its visceral, troubling power”, as its subject. The judges said: “Tara McEvoy describes a life that spanned much of the last century, albeit lived at the margins, accessing it through a wealth of archival material, interviews with contemporaries and close engagement with the poetry."

Finally, Annette Rubery is shortlisted for The Female Rake: Peg Woffington’s Scandalous Life on the Georgian Stage, in which she “mixes the sweat and greasepaint of Georgian Dublin theatreland with a wider perspective on the roles that bolder women in that era could choose to adopt, and charts Peg’s progress—fuelled by charisma, charm and fierce independence—out of the shame and penury of her origins into wealth, celebrity and, ultimately, myth”, according to the judges.